[Xmca-l] Re: Saussure vs Peirce

[Andy Blunden]

David, I do deplore sloppiness, and apart form the issue of 
utterance=word, I found a lot of sloppiness in the quote, 
but not so much as to be worth analysis.

But Bakhtin is correct in saying that a novel is an 
utterance. Like when we say "After his experiences in Spain, 
Orwell published /Homage to Catalonia/ and the Communist 
Party responded with a barrage of criticism ..."

What interests me though is the intimate and inextricable 
relation between narrative and concept, each constituting 
the other.

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 18/03/2019 8:17 am, David Kellogg wrote:
> Well, Bakhtin is full of precisely the kind of sloppiness 
> that Andy is deploring, Helena. So for example Bakhtin 
> says that a whole novel can be considered as an utterance. 
> You take down the book and open it. The novelist has 
> something to say to you. He says it. And then you close 
> the book and you put it back on the shelf.
>
> That's all very well, and it's very useful as a way of 
> showing that literature is not some "state within a 
> state": it is also made of language stuff, by people who 
> have a historical existence and not just an afterlife. But 
> it doesn't help Andy (or me, or my wife who studies these 
> things full time) distinguish sub-units within the novel 
> which will help us understand how novels are structured, 
> how this structure has changed with their function, and 
> how the very functions have changed as literature has 
> evolved. And these WERE the problems which Bakhtin set 
> himself (e.g. in "Novel and Epic" and elsewhere).
>
> We see the same problem from the other end (micro-rather 
> than macroscopic) with the minimal pair (originally, in 
> the work of Sacks, "adjacency pair"). It's all very well 
> and it's very useful as a way of understanding how 
> conversations get structured as they go along, how people 
> know when its their turn to talk and how they know when 
> the rules have been broken. But it doesn't help us to 
> understand, for example, why we all feel that when you say 
> "How are you?" and somebody says "Fine, thanks, and you?" 
> there seem to be three utterances in the second pair part, 
> and the exchange as a whole doesn't seem finished, even 
> though if we are using turns as the element (pair part) of 
> the minimal pair, it really should be.
>
> Craig Brandist remarks that Bakhtin uses the term 
> "dialogue" in so many different ways that he has rendered 
> it meaningless. I think the same thing is true of the way 
> he uses "utterance".
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article;
>
> David Kellogg (2019) THE STORYTELLER’S TALE: VYGOTSKY’S 
> ‘VRASHCHIVANIYA’, THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT AND 
> ‘INGROWING’ IN THE WEEKEND STORIES OF KOREAN CHILDREN, 
> British Journal of Educational Studies, DOI: 
> 10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200 
> <https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200>
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GSS2cTAVAz2jaRdPIkvj/full?target=10.1080/00071005.2019.1569200 
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 1:47 AM Helena Worthen 
> <helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>> 
> wrote:
>
>     I find it useful to think of an utterance as bounded
>     on two ends: on one, by the utterance to which it
>     responds, on the other, by the utterance that responds
>     to it. Thus you can discern utterances within
>     utterances. Minimally, a two -part exchange, as Martin
>     says; maximally, a whole stream of briefer utterances
>     bounded by their prompt and response.
>
>     Helena Worthen
>     helenaworthen@gmail.com <mailto:helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>
>
>
>>     On Mar 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, Martin Packer
>>     <mpacker@cantab.net <mailto:mpacker@cantab.net>> wrote:
>>
>>     According to conversation analysts, the minimal unit
>>     in conversation is the adjacency pair: a two-part
>>     exchange in which the second utterance is
>>     functionally dependent on the first. Question-answer;
>>     greeting-greeting; request-reply, and so on. An
>>     utterance, then, is both a turn and a move within a
>>     conversation. An utterance is *not* “complete in
>>     itself” - it is a component in a larger organization:
>>     at least a pair, and usually a much longer sequence.
>>
>>     Martin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>     On Mar 16, 2019, at 3:11 AM, Andy Blunden
>>>     <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     I would  have appreciated a definition of some kind
>>>     of what the writer actually means by "utterance." In
>>>     absence of that "the word, as a compressed version
>>>     of the utterance" is nonsense, or at least a step
>>>     backwards because it obliterates a concept.
>>>     Otherwise, I wouldn't mind saying that the two are
>>>     together the micro- and macro-units of dialogue (or
>>>     something having that meaning). The same as Leontyev
>>>     has two units of activity: action and activity, and
>>>     Marx has two units of political economy: commodity
>>>     and capital. To theorise a complex process you
>>>     always need two units.
>>>
>>>     The rest of what you have cited reminds me of what
>>>     Constantin Stanislavskii said about the units of an
>>>     actor's performance:
>>>
>>>     https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/stanislavskii.pdf
>>>
>>>     Andy
>>>
>>>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>>>     Andy Blunden
>>>     http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>>     On 16/03/2019 5:42 pm, Arturo Escandon wrote:
>>>>     Thanks for that conceptual jewel, mate.
>>>>
>>>>     Let me bring here Akhutina to further show their
>>>>     complementariness:
>>>>
>>>>     The minimal holistic unit of conversation is the
>>>>     utterance. An utterance, unlike a sentence, is
>>>>     complete in itself. The utterance always carries
>>>>     within it the marks and features of who is speaking
>>>>     to whom, for what reason and in what situation; it
>>>>     is polyphonic. An utterance develops from a
>>>>     motivation, “a volitional objective” and progresses
>>>>     through inner speech to external speech. The prime
>>>>     mover of the semantic progression (from the inner
>>>>     word that is comprehensible to me alone to the
>>>>     external speech that he, the listener, will
>>>>     understand) is the comparison of my subjective,
>>>>     evanescent sense, which I attribute to the given
>>>>     word, and its objective (constant for both me and
>>>>     my listener) meaning.Thus, the major building
>>>>     material for speech production is the living
>>>>     two-voice word. But polyphony is a feature of the
>>>>     utterance as expressed in the word; the word
>>>>     carrying personal sense is an abbreviation of the
>>>>     utterance. Thus, the utterance and the word, as a
>>>>     compressed version of the utterance, are the units
>>>>     of speech acts, communication, and consciousness.
>>>>
>>>>     Best
>>>>
>>>>     Arturo
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>     -- 
>>>>     Sent from Gmail Mobile
>>
>>
>>
>>     Martin
>>
>>     /"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr.
>>     Lowie or discuss matters with Radcliffe-Brown or
>>     Kroeber, I become at once aware that my partner does
>>     not understand anything in the matter, and I end
>>     usually with the feeling that this also applies to
>>     myself” (Malinowski, 1930)/
>>
>>
>>
>
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