Some notes on: Washabaugh, W. (1980) The role of speech in the construction of reality. Semiotica, 31, pp.197-214.

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Point of article: Against ‘the self’ being the source of action - action centered in ‘the interactive moment’

Two terms: “Ego” - what we are ‘in ourselves’ (inner self); “Self” - how we relate ourselves to what is around us (social self).

1. Rationalism and relativity:

1.1 Linguistic rationalism (modernism): Some linguists feel (generative linguists) that the underlying characteristics of language are unitary, systematic, and universal, common to all in the same way - mental life is independent of language.

These universal characteristics are merely remolded and reshaped at surface levels by a variety of perceptual and productive constraints.

There is something at a deep, abstract level, something substantive (some essential stuff), that is common to all human mental life (lingua mentis).

1.2 Linguistic relativity thesis (Whorf): claims that the mental lives of people differ with their language - it is perhaps resisted at this point in time just when we want an “international human rights policy.”

Linguistic relativity comes to the fore if we think about language, not as a [substantive] system, as a pattern of already spoken forms, but as an activity, and in terms of what people are doing in their speakings.

Human nature, not a substance (thing) but a function (way of doing)

Think of our Selves, not as a ‘thing’ (substance) but as the ‘character’ of our way of ‘moving’ about in our world (function), as our ‘way of being’, our ‘way’ of relating ourselves to what is around us.

2. The behavior of ‘speaking’ not the ‘structure’ of language that matters:

-         Speaking exerts a formative influence over our perceptions, actions, thinkings, evaluations, and relations to others.

-         Speaking creates the speaker; situates him/her in a community; and confirms the reality the reality of both the community and the world constructed by the community.

3. These two forms of speaking form two kinds of consciousness:

-         Speaking forms its self-constituting task in a paradoxical fashion: the speaker, in both responding to their own situation (answerability) and to those whom they are addressing, simultaneously identifies with the ego speaking and the alter ego listening.

-         In one moment of relationship (the ‘interactive moment’), a speaker establishes relationships between i) speaker and ego; and ii) between speaker and alter ego, the community.

-         Different modes of speaking highlight different aspects of this duality.

-         Modes: i) Speaker may direct attention inwards toward speaker-ego relationship; or, ii) outward toward ego-community relationship.

3.1 Two sorts of speakings and two sorts of self-consciousnesses:

Two kinds of Speaking:

Two kinds of Self-consciousness:

4. The functions of the two ideal-typical speakings and the consciousnesses to which they give rise: Literate and oral.

4.1 Literate:

-         We can associate literacy with the idea of mastery and self-mastery.

-         The ‘master’s’ self-consciousness: belief that the Self presented to others arises out of an ‘inner’ ego - ‘I’ express my Self - I am ‘self-grounded’.

-         The ‘master’, with his ideology of ego-groundedness, regards himself as essentially independent of others.

-         Indeed, he sees all people as independent of each other, and as essentially complete in themselves.

It is ‘writing’, literacy, that inaugurates a way of knowing that separates the ‘speaker’ from the ‘listener’.

-         Writing does not make use of the listener or his powers, rather writing must create the listener. Ong: “all writers must fictionalize their audiences, casting them in made-up roles” (1977, p.58).

-         The writer does not depend upon his audience; neither is he reliant upon a social context.

-         Writing not only excludes the community and the context, it actually obviates the writers intellectual and emotional commitment to the listening community. ‘Wring’ is a speaking ‘that does not recognize or make problematic its own grounds” (Gouldner, 1976, p.45).

-         Writing establishes the paradoxical condition in which speakers come to deny that their own speaking and their own consciousness is conditioned.

4.2 Oral (‘traditionalist’):

-         The traditionalist is completely identified with the community to the point of repressing all individuality.

-         No concept of Self apart from its context.

Dinka: “have no conception which at all closely corresponds to our popular modern conception of the ‘mind’, as mediating and. as it were, storing up experiences of the self. There is for them no such interior entity to appear, on reflection, to stand between the experiencing self at any given moment and what is or has been an exterior influence upon the self” (Lienhardt, 1961, p.149).

Gahuka-Gama: “Contrasted with our own fixed ethical perspective, that of the Gahhuka-Gama is continually changing. Men, in other words, are not conceived to be equals in a moral sense: their value does not reside in themselves as individuals or persons; it is dependent, rather, on the position they occupy within a system of inter-personal and inter-group relations” (Read, 1967, p.199).

-         This speaking occurs in texts (i.e., in ‘interweavings’) - in ‘utterances’ not ‘sentences’.

-         ‘Texts’, ‘utterances’ are understood in terms of interactional experiences, in a context.

-         Unlike sentences, ‘texts’ do not have significant parts which, when isolated, retain a conventional meaning.

-         Such speaking is face-to-face, multimodal, evaluative speaking, that is uninterpretable outside the community.

-         Works by a characteristic ‘movement’, by generating ‘feelings’ not representations.

Navaho: “Navaho interpretation of the constitution of reality and the causation of events are all based on an unbreakable communication between mind and matter, speech and event. In this regard, primary importance and creative power is always attributed to thought and speech (p.9)... To speak and sing the order, harmony and beauty of hozho is to make contact with the ultimate source of life... After a person has projected hozho into the air through ritual form, he then, at the conclusion of the ritual, breathes that hozho back into himself and makes himself a part of that order, harmony, and beauty he has projected onto the world through the ritual mediums of speech and song” (Ong, 1977, p.61).

Dogon: “Words, for the Dogon, are spread throughout the body in the form of waters. “When the human speaks, the word leaves in the form of vapor, the water of the word having been warmed by the heart... In the Dogon view, a thought which does not look to be expressed in words does not exist.” And as with the Navaho, the word, once spoken, constitutes Self for “the simple fact of calling someone by one of his names, increases in him the corresponding nama (vital force In effect we can understand the mechanism of the word to be essentially an action of the vital forces of the individual [solidarity with others]” (Calme-Griaule, 1965, p.35).

5. What is it like to be ‘me’: ‘my’ situation:

Thus, if we now ask ourselves in such situations: ‘What is it like to be me?’ - thus to tell others should they ask - it is possible for me to answer by describing ‘my external world’, ‘my situation’. I can describe it in terms of:

-         i) the ‘things’ I perceive in it;

-         ii) the values I attach to them, how I perceive them, and the reactions I have towards them;

-         iii) the opportunities for action and understanding it ‘affords’ me;

-         iv) the nature of my rights, duties, privileges and obligations in relation to the others around me;

-         v) the ‘ground’ to which I appeal for the power and the authority of these rights and duties [‘in’ me (ego) or ‘in’ the others around me (community)];

-         vi) its ‘horizon’, i.e., what is not actually at the moment ‘visible’ to me in my situation but to what I can point as being reasonable for me to expect in the future;

-         vii) I can qualify all the above by remarking upon its precariousness, because they all depend upon my first-person right to speak and act, and have what I say or do taken seriously, and that is continually in contest.

This (to the extent that I am permitted to fill it out in detail) is my identity, who at this moment ‘I’ am. Indeed, my very use of the word ‘I’ - in such expressions as ‘I think I may be able to see a solution’, or ‘I feel I have placed myself in difficulties here’ - allows me to talk about what it is like, in my unique ‘position’ at the moment within different, changing, socially constructed situations, to be me.

6. What is repressed in each form:

-         These two forms of speaking constitute two forms of relation: i) of speaker to ego; and ii) of speaker to the community.

-         In i) the relationship of the speaker to his/her community is repressed; this repression is ‘engineered’ by ‘writing’ in that it creates the impression that one can sit down all alone and create a meaningful speech.

-         In ii) it is the relationship of the speaker to their own individuality that is repressed. The ‘traditionalist’ is not ‘self-monitoring’, ‘self-controlling’, i.e., autonomous, in the way that the modern person is.

7. The tasks in a real community: ‘doing’ and ‘meaning’:

-         The speakings in a real community cannot be so neatly classified as the dichotomy of ‘writing’/’literacy vs. ‘mimesis’/orality would suggest.

-         Actual speakings must perform two essential functions simultaneously: i) survival (instrumental action) and ii) making sense.

-         i) Everyday technical tasks of getting food, shelter, doings things, resolving disputes, etc..

-         ii) Building up a “fabric of meaning,” a “symbolic container” in terms of which their is ‘point’ to everything one does - “why this farce day after day?”

Privileging of one type over the other: different communities place different values on these two tasks of surviving and making sense.

-         i) Traditionalist cultures: technical activity only done if it makes sense to do it.

-         ii) Modern, literate cultures: make sense of what they do in terms of ‘solving technical problems’ - this is who we in the West are.

8. The ‘grounds’ to which we appeal as to a source of power and authority:

-         Where should we search for the source of meaning in our lives?

-         i) In the community? or ii) in our selves?

-         In ‘trad’ cultures power adheres (is attributed) to the community; in ‘technological’ cultures power adheres (is attributed) to the ego.

-         Although power is attributed to ego or community, it does not inhere in them (power is not in ‘things’): power is continually recreated in ‘the interactive moment’.

Because the ‘ground’ of Self is always imputed/attributed to one ‘thing’ or the other, it is always in danger of coming ‘unstuck’ - people can become puzzled as to where, exactly, the authority and power of their activities should be grounded.

-         i) There is the supposed ‘primitive’ imputation of power to the sacred: to those (boundary) phenomena in the community (rituals) that evoke awe and mystery.

-         ii) Westerners impute power and authority to the ego rather than to the community.

Westerners are self-grounded: “Ideologies foster in the actor the sense of his own subjecthood... covey a conception of normal person as center of power and decision... imply and ask him to think he has power” (Gouldner, 1976, p.67).

9. Two conditions that may erode ‘grounds’ of self: social evolution and external threat:

i) Social evolution and external threat.

-         9.1: Social evolution (this is now being reversed): “If logical thought tends to rid itself more and more of the subjective and personal elements which still encumber it at its origin, it is... because social life of a new sort is developing. It is this international life which has already resulted in universalizing religious beliefs... Consequently things can no longer be contained in the social molds according to which they were primitively classified; they demand to be organized according to principles which are their own and, therefore, logical organization becomes differentiated from social organization and becomes autonomous” (Lukes, 1977, p.438).

-         This process of withdrawing from the community and ‘grounding’ Self in the ego is sketched clearly in Bellah (1958, Bellah et al, 1985).

-         9.2: The presence of a dominant alien community impinging upon my own:

-         i) In a ‘trad’ culture: the Dinka have the Nuer; the Mbuti have the Bantu - their sacred is impugned, and their community is scandalized.

-         ii) In an ‘ego-grounded’ culture: I must seek a ‘ground’ for my ego elsewhere... Victor Turner (1969, p.141) describes “antistructural moments” in which normal categories are set aside and an effort made to re-establish new ones in the ambiguous ground between ego-‘ground’ and alter-‘ground’ (community).