Jay and Helen's message came this morning and I began wondering about the
historical as I have been making my way through Bahktin's essays (Dialogic
Imagination).
Last night my bed time reading was "The Speaking Person in the Novel" from
*Discourse in the Novel* and his differentiation of "authorative discourse"
and "internally persuasive" came to mind. He says,
"The authorative word demands we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it
binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us
internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The
authorative word is located in a distanced zone organically connected with a
past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is so to speak, the word
of our fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is
a prior discourse. It is therefore not a question of choosing it among
other possible discourses that are its equal. It is given in lofty spheres,
not those of familiar contact."
The relationship or struggle between the two creates consciousness.
I keep going back to Peter's conferderate flag example, it does not simply
reference a war from the past, but invokes so much more. Peter says in
reference to the transactional zone,
"I would argue that the common invocation of conventions is what enables
readers and texts to meet in the transactional zone. As the examples of "A
Modest Proposal" and the Underground Railroad signs reveal, readers who lack
enculturation to reading codes will not have access to the meaning potential
that they suggest. One important point about the necessity of a
transactional zone is that the meaning potential of a text can be read quite
differently by people who read codes according to the same set of
conventions."
For me, the transactional zone gets pretty close to how I see "meaning". You
have the perspectives of the senator who had his "feelings hurt" and the
African American who sees it as a symbol of slavery and oppresssion, yet
both perspectives are in this transactional zone and one of those
perspectives are legitmized as "official meaning" by having the flag on top
of the statehouse.
In reading Gary's message a few threads back, I wondered whose "human being"
and whose "fairness" is it? Or more specifically in the context of the flag,
out of all the potential meanings in the transactional zone certain ones
emerge as official and certain ones don't.
It seems useful to me to see "meaning" as a cultural-historical process that
has stability (for better or worse)as in an "authorative discourse" yet is
also dymamic in the sense at one time even that discourse was "internally
persuasive". We not only "make meaning" so to speak, but it makes us. It is
always a personal and collective struggle of what and whose meaning will be
official.
Nate
Nate Schmolze
http://www.geocities.com/nate_schmolze/
schmolze@students.wisc.edu
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"Overcoming the naturalistic concept of mental development calls for a
radically new approach
to the interrelation between child and society. We have been led to this
conclusion by a
special investigation of the historical emergence of role-playing. In
contrast to the view
that role playing is an eternal extra-historical phenomenon, we hypothesized
that role playing emerged at a specific stage of social development, as the
child's position in society changed
in the course of history. role-playing is an activity that is social in
origin and,
consequently, social in content."
D. B. El'konin
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