Re: acronym enquiry (SFL)/ genres, values & tensions

Rolfe Windward (rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu)
Sun, 25 Aug 1996 14:13:26 -0700

Hmmmm ... suspicion _of_ linguists or linguistics is not really what I
intended--as Judy notes, any technology is subject to multiple uses, some
potentially deleterious. It's more like a suspicion that the "linguistic
turn" as an intellectual _project_ (in the unfolding Sartrean sense) is
covering old ground and that ground is ineluctably bound to print culture
and the meaning(s) of power. Bruno Latour for example, in what he terms the
growing "crises of criticism," deplores the increasing obsession with the
speaking subject (and its incommensurability with the 'objects' of 'nature)
and the way this distracts us from the central work of translation which is
found in mediation (particularly of/with the artifacts or "quasi-objects"
co-inhabiting our networks of practice). This is one reason he dismisses
postmodernism as the last gasp of the modernist project rather than anything
genuinely novel--a final decentering as it were.

Since I freely confess more ignorance than knowledge on the matter let me
cite Donald Kelley's (1990, pp. 328) comments and see what a linguist's
response would be (if any).

"For intellectual historians the aim is, by suppressing or bypassing the
(thinking, writing) subject, including the voice of authorial will, to gain
access to the metalinguistic and metahistorical patterns of social
intercourse and conflict--to find the critical Archimedean point which
philosophers have sought for centuries. What Foucault has called the 'will
to knowledge' (though ultimately this is not Nietzschean or even Baconian
but Aristotelian) has always hoped to 'demystify' the products of human
consciousness--to tear away the last mask with which culture, ideology, and
language cover the naked truth of nature, or of power.
This is more than a noble dream; it is an impossible dream. Gadamer
would perhaps reject the effort as another attempt to 'circumvent language,'
McLuhan regard it as a classic example (after Ramus) of the permeation of
print culture, Vico see it as another 'learned conceit,' Valla scorn it as
one more scholastic fiction, Fraunce deplore it as more vain prating of
method and rayling against the forefathers, and Lovejoy would no doubt
dismiss it as another attempt to suppress the dualist condition of human
knowledge. For there is no point 'beyond criticism.' Like consciousness
itself (the Geist an sich) the 'meaning' of a text beyond particular
constructions (or reconstructions or deconstructions) must remain
inaccessible, or at least unutterable."

regards, Rolfe

Kelley, D. R. (1990). Horizons of Intellectual History: Retrospect,
Circumspect, Prospect. In D. R. Kelley (Ed.), _The History of Ideas: Canon
and Variations_ (Vol. 1, pp. 312-338). New York: University of Rochester Press.

Rolfe Windward [UCLA GSE&IS: Curriculum & Teaching]
e-mail: rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu (Text/BinHex/MIME/Uuencode)
70014.0646 who-is-at compuserve.com (text/binary/GIF/JPG)