The WE

From: Paul H.Dillon (illonph@pacbell.net)
Date: Mon Mar 26 2001 - 23:16:29 PST


Gary,

yet again . . . WE

? ? ?

where is the WE in the heteroglossia ??

who is WE ? ? ?

i deeply distrust all who speak in the second person plural when they don't
openly admit their political intent.

for as much as a detest Ayn Rand's ideas (gave them up in 9th grade) I can
never forget that her first novel, Anthem, where EGO was proclaimed as a
sacred holy word, had the great insight that at the basis of all
totalitarianism is the WE. the WE that is the opposite of dialogue, the
opposite of discourse, Heidegger's anonymous THEM proclaimed as subject or
the guy with the big cigar who just walked out of the smoky back room, or
the conclave.

and who, pray tell, will draw the line between "intellectual debate" and
getting somewhere? ? WE? but, pray tell, please enumerate just who the WE
is.

I really love the quechua language family, although I only speak it middlin'
well and then only in a couple of dialects. Besides the agglutinative,
processual syntax, they also have two variants of the second person plural:

Nyuqanchis- the second person plural that includes the speaker and the
addressee,
Nyuqayqu - the second person plural that includes the speaker and unstated
OTHERS but excludes the addressee

does the "we" that you use exclude or include? or from a Nietschean
perspective (a la Birth of Tragedy) is your WE appolonian or dionysian ? and
if appolonian which WE is on the stage, which in the audience?

quechua also has another nice feature: a suffix is attached to every
macro-morpheme functioning as TOPIC in an utterance that enables the
listener to know whether what the speaker says is based on first hand
knowledge or on what they heard from someone else (or read although reading
is not part of the traditional quecha culture--they had no writing) A
reportative suffix, something that I'm sure Bakhtin in the spirit of
indirect discourse would have had a great time with). But just think how
these two features, exclusive/inclusive second person plural and reportative
suffix, if used in the English of xmca would rapidly change the entire
structure of OUR discourse. Would a great gap be revealed between those who
theorize about all these ideas and those really try to put them into
practice out there in the world among people that don't talk or write about
them (the way engineers put the theorems of calculus into practice among
people who can't even add or subtract) or is that just MY conjecture?

By the way, have you seen the collection that Umberto Eco assembled on
Sherlock Holmes as a paradigmatic example of Peircean abduction ? I ran
across it in Borders the other day. It looks interesting

Paul H. Dillon

----- Original Message -----
From: Gary D Shank <shank@duq.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2001 8:24 PM
Subject: Re: Public education

> xmca in my estimation is not a place where we have fun with intellectual
> debate. it is a place where we try to get somewhere. going over tired
> old arguments because someone wants to play is just tiresome. maybe its
> my fault because i'm turning into an old crack, but i dont want to do this
> yet one more time with yet one more duellist.
>
> i get the sinking feeling that the real talk has migrated elsewhere. did
> i miss the bus again?
>
> grumpy old gary shank
> shank@duq.edu
>
>
>
>



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