“Every sign is subject…

“Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation (i.e., whether it is true, false, correct, fair, good, etc.). The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value.” (Bakhtin/Voloshnokov 1211)

“Everything Ideological possesses semiotic value …”

Writing is the use of language in a textual medium, composed of a system of signs and signifiers. Because the act of writing is a symbolic system at a remove (through dissociation) from the ideas and objects to which it refers, it can serve to make knowledge about ideas and objects which may or may not have correspondence to reality. The correspondence of writing to reality is relative to communities, politics and human development. Writing, like other mediums, is a form of communication, a modality that allows people to understand one another. After the invention of the printing press, the democratization of textual production allowed people greater access to knowledge and ideas that were rarely available before.

Bakhtin (1895-1975) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (early work, published in 1973)

Bakhtin argues that language is a sign system inseparable from ideology, and that although signs themselves are neutral, they are the only medium through which meaning is made, and this meaning can only be made through interaction of actors in society. Furthermore, Bakhtin theorizes that the language sign system resides even in consciousness—an otherwise “innerword embryo of expression” in consciousness is not significant until it enters into social relations. (1218): “Word is present in each and every act of understanding and in each and every act of interpretation.” (1214).

Neither the extremest subjectivity of consciousness nor any material objectivity is separable from either the domain of signs or the domain of ideology:

“Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation (i.e., whether it is true, false, correct, fair, good, etc.). The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value.” (1211)

“Meaning does not reside in the word” or in the souls of speakers and listeners. The word is “a neutral sign,” which is to say that words themselves are not capable of expressing any ideology.

Meaning belongs “To a word in its position between speakers” realized only “in the process of active, responsive understanding.” Most human communication, furthermore, is ideologically complex. “Any true understanding is dialogic in nature.” (1226)  Bakhtin promotes “active understanding”: “To understand another person’s utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper place for it in the corresponding context.”

In what way does Bakhtin provide a route for persuasion? Or for appraising ideological considerations? Determining good ideology from bad ideology? Bakhtin’s philosophy of language implies “a volatile notion of both ethics and rhetoric, one that provides no guarantees that the consequences of discourse in the ethical encounter will yield order, the establishment of a viable polis, or in fact any reasonable outcome at all” and “the moment of utterance—the rhetorical moment—is […] radically open” and “how one ought to act has not been definitevly decided” (Bernard-Donals & Capdevielle, “Bakhtin Ethics Rhetoric” 319). They continue to tease out implications of doubting one’s response, how one will be responded to, or to whom utterances may really be directing. As such the superaddressee in this situation might inspire one to remain in familiar territory. The superaddressee in the composition classroom could be an abstract notion of academic authority.

Consciousness reinforces the meanings realized by the utterance’s determination in social discourse: “The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outside” (1215). “Realized expression, in its turn, exerts a powerful, reverse influence on experience: it begins to tie inner life together, giving it more definite and lasting expression.” (1218)

[Our inner world accommodates itself to the possibilities and directions available for expression (it is limited, tamed by these avenues)] (1218)

Bakhtin’s analysis makes the stability of definitions proposed by Locke (in era) unlikely.

Nevertheless, Locke is the one to have coined the term semiotics.

Connecting Bakhtin’s ideas with Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca From The New Rhetoric helps position the volatility and openness of Bakhtin’s dialogism within a complementary appraisal of audience, but speaks more explicitly about argument and persuasion.

“The idea of the universal audience has frequently been misunderstood: Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca emphasize that there is no actual universal audience, nor any unimpeachable facts or truths that could be presented to it, but rather, only an idea in the speaker’s mind about what such an audience would be were it to exist. An argument may gain persuasive power by appearing to appeal to this universal audience.” (1373)

Foucault would call the turn when writing rewrites itself by rewriting consciousness which reproduces what’s been written upon it “things” would be for Foucault “the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error” or through “the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak” (1441).

Perelman and Obrechts-Tyteca argue against the “absolutist epistemology” of early 1900s philosophers who sought scientific “distinction[s] between judgments of reality and value judgments” and sought “to save the norms of human action from arbitrariness and irrationality.” (1377) This refutation would also suffice against Locke or Hume. Furthermore, Perelman & Obrechts-Tyteca would deliver two apologies on the behalf of absolutist epistemologists. First would be “the lack of success in developing a logic of value judgments,  and the second is “the difficulty of satisfactorily defining value judgments and judgments of reality” (1377).

Perelman’s description of Socratic dialogue: “truth is the keynote for dialectic” (1391).

“Truth, it was held, presided over a dialectical discussion, and the interlocutors had to reach agreement about it by themselves, whereas rhetoric taught only how to present a point of view—that is to say, a partial aspect of the question—and the decision of the issue was left up to a third person.” (1391)

“The rhetorician, like the Sophist, is the controller of opinion and hence of appearance, while what matters to the philosopher and the sage is the knowledge of truth and the practice of the good, in conformity to that truth.”

Even though the New Rhetoric provides a persuasive claim and answer to the confines of logical systems, the view point is still not thoroughly enculturated. Contemporary appraisals of rhetoric tend to echo the Socratic view of rhetoric. People still believe that there is something negative about rhetoric, whereas logical positivist claims to truth continue to have credibility.

Rhetorical theories of contextualized epistemologies could or might reveal something about scientific epistemologies. We, as rhetoricians/rhetorical scholars, make much out of our imbrication with language. What does language have to do, if it does at all, with the way that scientists make discoveries? For instance, it seems that since every experiment begins with an hypothesis, that the creation of this hypothesis must have some relation to language and have relevance with respect to these theories of the New Rhetoric.

Rhetorical theories that oppose the scientific position that the truth is out there waiting to be discovered seem to have greater efficacy or importance when it comes to value-laden rule systems, language being the primary one.

Perelman’s ideas revisit the classic and even contemporary belief about rhetoric being empty speech. Instead, he believes that philosophy is itself a form of rhetoric and that its claim to scientific or logical truth does not stand when it comes to value judgments or morality. He also believes that philosophical reasoning does not contain arguments. Arguments happen in rhetoric where there is a need to contextualize positions rather than to prove the truth-value of a specific claim. As soon as value-judgments are contextualized, one must contend with the reality that values and beliefs come from non-rational faculties, such as the emotions.

Perelman’s approach to achieving truth-value in rhetorical argumentation is audience-centered. He believes that the audience has as much agency in creating knowledge of an issue as does the rhetor. (This solution is more sound than the solutions either Locke, Hume (or Kant) provide on this problem). Knowledge ends up being made from the interaction and response between audience and writer/speaker.

Logic uses words to prove its type of truth. This happens first on the textual level. Then again with reader interpretation. Then further when scope of cultural differences and attitudes expands. Because in the end we cannot separate language from ideology and therefore when we are in the business of teaching tool-use we also teach values.

Foucault, remember, says that it is not possible to link one sentence to another without the whole field in operation. Foucault, remember, says that what one utters can precisely not be replicated (perfect identification) in the mind of the hearer.

1438 “It would be quite wrong to see discourse as a place where previously established objects are laid one one after another like words on a page.” (Foucault)

Foucault (1926-1984) From The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Michel Foucault 1926-1984

From Orders of Discourse:

“forbidden speech, the division of madness, and the will to truth” are “the three great systems of exclusion which forge discourse” (1463). “The sophist is banished”

These systems of exclusion “rest on an institutional support […] reinforced and renewed by whole strata of practices, such as pedagogy [..] and the system of books, publishing, libraries; learned societies in the past and laboratories now […] and is also renewed […] by the way in which knowledge is put to work, valorized, distributed, and in a sense attributed, in a society”

THE SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN THOUGHT AND SPEECH

“Ever since the sophists’ tricks and influence were excluded and since their paradoxes habe been more or less safely muzzled, it seems that Western thought has taken care to ensure that discourse should occupy the smallest possible space between thought and speech.”

Thought========================================================èSpeech (Figrs)

Thought=>Speech (Literalisms)

Philosophies of “exchange, reading, and writing never put anything at stake except signs. In this way discourse is annulled in its reality and put at the disposal of the signifier.” “We must call into question our will to truth, restore to discourse its character as an event, and finally throw off the sovereighnty of the signifier” (1470)”

(BUT LET US ACKNOWLEDGE THAT FOUCAULT’S IDEAS ARE ALSO SUPPORTED NOW BY THESE SYSTEMS, REINFORCED AND RENEWED BY THEM]

However, “Exchange and communication are positive figures working inside complex systems of restriction, and probably would not be able to function independently of them” (1468). Perhaps the classroom could be conceived of as such a space. Especially if we imagine that the architecture of knowledge can change.

From The Archaeology of Knowledge  (1969)

Foucault examines epistemology’s relationship to power, to questions of reality, and to the limits of discourse.

Like Vico, Foucault is also interested in the cultural implications of our discursive orientations. The habitus that ensnares members of institutions also shields them from seeing clearly beyond their peripheral vision. Examples, such as Vico gives about the subtlety and abstraction of the French language, and Foucault’s typewriter remind one of the politics of certain interfaces, the immediate surroundings of our discursive limits throw up signs of reality, enough that one might forget that not all typewriter keypads are identified as Q, W, E, R, T, Y. Foucault writes: “Let us look at the example again: the keyboard of a typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of letters, A, Z, E, R, T, listed in a typewriting manual, is the statement of the alphabetical order adopted by French typewriters.”

Foucault echoes Bakhtin. 1452 “For a series of signs to exist, there must—in accordance with the system of causality—be an ‘author’ or a transmitting authority. But this ‘author’ is not identical with the subject of the statement; and the relation of production that he has with the formulation is not superposable to the relation that unites the enunciating subject and what he states”

Understanding of the signs then, again, requires knowing the codes (again def. of codes).

1455 “It is not enough to say a sentence, it is not even enough to say it in a particular relation to a field of objects or in a particular relation to a subject, for a statement to exist: it must be related to a whole adjacent field.”

“Nor are these borders identical with the various texts and sentences that the subject may be conscious of when he speaks”

“The psychological halo of a formulation is controlled from afar by the arrangement of the enunciative field.” Echoes of Bakhtinian openness but adds to it—it makes the question of knowledge-making possible—because of the unpredictably of what happens when these various relations, players arrange themselves with in a particular situation—The inevitably of meaning emerging from the encounter. For this there are ethical implications, but is there ethical guidance: “the way in which other statements are present in the mind of the subject will not be the same: neither the same level, nor the same form of linguistic experience, of verbal memory, of reference to what has already been said, is operating in each case.”