Con/textures

Throughout this book, we see people in specific societal circumstances engaged in the business of talking, and, in so doing, not only engaged in realizing the talk of business but also in bringing the very business into existence. Or, rather, we see people in various forms of conversations. In and through their conversations, sequentially ordered turn-taking, through diachronic and synchronic communication features, they produce the very structures of (immortal) society that social scientists note and describe. To do so, these scientists require the same conversational skills that the people they study display. The essence/being/life of language, therefore, is the relation of speaking to language. Talk realizes and singularizes the possibilities of language in a concrete way. It is only one moment in the totality of life, which constitutes a network of significations in which that which is properly language in language and everything else constitute a text. This text is not-is not in the sense of a finalized entity-but continually becomes, undergoing continual transformation, having both a limited thematized moment and an unlimited (bottomless pit) of unnamed and unnamable dimensions. The resulting con/textures reflect the tissue of language and life it theorizes. In this penultimate chapter, I weave together-thus con/texture-a phenomenological and, therefore, pragmatic perspective on language from the works of such philosophers as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Much of this perspective goes against the mainstream current of present-day thinking on language, learning, and context. In this chapter, I weave together different texts-my own analyses and those of language philosophers-creating con/textures by means of which I create con/jectures (literally, a throwing together, Lat. conjic¯ere) concerning language, learning, and contexts. The dominating mainstream current of thought places primacy on intentionality: it is the starting point, driver, and ending point of theories of language use, discourse, and talking. It is “phallogocentric” (Derrida 1996: 131), for it emphasizes language (logos) and reasoning (logos) as we have come to know it through the history of Western thought in the Greek tradition, culminating in

Der Mensch spricht [Man speaks] Die Sprache spricht [Language speaks]

(Heidegger 1985: 9, 10)

the ratiocinations of Immanuel Kant (the Logodaedalus). But the examples provided throughout this book exhibit the fact that intentionality cannot be the paradigm on which to build a solid theory of language, its concrete realization in speech, and the various other forms of thinking about language, learning, and context that appear in the frameworks of constructivism in all of its different brands (social, radical, etc.). In a relevant pun on Heidegger’s formula, Paul de Man (1979: 277) writes “Sprache verspricht (sich),” which can be heard both as “language promises” and “language makes a slip of tongue.” Language is about … something and makes and simultaneously promises the truth of the said. Derrida (1988b), picking up on this pun in his Mémoires for Paul de Man, notes-against speech act theory-that difference between the constative (saying about) and the performative (promise) of language becomes undecidable. There is never just one meaning but always already an excess in language, thereby undermining the traditional view of language as a code or tool. In Chapter 2, we see how in talking about something, the interlocutors make the very situation that constitutes the framing condition-the context, the text surrounding text, literally the tissue, from Latin texe¯re, to weave-of their content talk. This context, therefore, constitutes another form of the excess of language. Words (text) contribute to making the very context that allows us to understand them and their sense. In talking the talk, we walk the walk; and this walk is not causally (pre-) determined but an exploration that lays the garden path in walking. The situation between Annemarie and David (Chapter 2) in particular shows how we can never know whether the situation in which we enter is actually sustained in and through our talking, so that we might find ourselves in very different situations of our own making. This same kind of auto-affection is at work in the Chapter 3, concerned as it is with the evolution of the speaking | thinking unit, an auto-affection that allows the very possibility of changing the genre or producing a major error in a lecture. Here I show (a) how talk is but one of the forms in which a position in and onto the world is articulated and expressed; (b) that the very structure of the utterance needs to be understood from a more holistic phenomenon of communication, which also includes (deictic, iconic) gestures, prosody, body position, body orientation, and structures in the setting including those produced in and for the situation at hand (like the diagrams, notes on a chalkboard); and (c) that speaking and thinking have to be thought together as a speaking | thinking unit. Not only is language subject to the situation as a whole, speakers are subject to the possibilities of language-there is, as I show in Chapter 4, an essential passivity involved in using language. First, the language is not that of the singular (solipsistic) subject but always already has come from the Other and is both for the Other and, in and through our speaking, returns to the Other. This dimension of language shapes the utterance, because it cannot ever be what I want to express but is inherently recipient designed. Second, I show in Chapter 4 that the locution and intent do not capture the entire phenomenon of the utterance but that the effect (the perlocution) and the social evaluation also need to be taken into account. Speakers, however, are passive with respect to this effect, much as listeners are passive with respect to it. Interlocution therefore constitutes an ethical relation through and through.