- Email: [email protected]
Real people doing real things in real time
Language & Communication. Vol. 17. No. 4, pp. 359-368, 1997 Science Ltd G 1997 Elsevier All
rights
reserved.
Printed 0271-5309/97
in Great Britain $17.00+0.00
PII: SO271-5309(97)00017-7
REAL
PEOPLE
DOING
REAL
GEORGE
THINGS
IN REAL
TIME’
WOLF
Michael Toolan. Total Speech: An Integrational Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Linguistic Approach to Language.
If there are readers sitting expectantly at the edges of their chairs hoping for a Kuhnian paradigm shift to sweep away generative grammar and its cognitivist scions, they may be initially disappointed by Michael Toolan’s new book. For the author studiously avoids any temptation to lead an absolutist crusade: So I wish to emphasize from the outset that this book is not ‘against’ segregationalist linguistic analysis and the treatment of languages as mechanistic codes; rather, it attempts to show the inadequacies of any thoroughgoing adoption and application of those principles (p. 3). The goal has not been wholesale rejection of the network of notions (literal meaning etc.) found to be suspect: each notion has played and continues to play an important role in various cultures’ thinking about language and society. What is argued for is the need for radical change in the way these notions operate as the foundations of contemporary theorizing about language and communication (p. IO). At the same time, it is arguable that what is chiefly required is not a new methodology but rather a revised application of extant methods. In this book, insofar as analytic methods and procedures are discussed, the latter view is advanced (p. 22).
Yet the subtlety and sweep of the book are such that it soon becomes clear that what appears to be protected by disclaimers becomes increasingly threatened by implication; and the book ends up being disturbing in unexpected ways, Toolan’s chapters (on literal meaning, metaphor, intentionality, relevance, repetition, and rules, with a middle chapter on further integrationist principles) will be of interest not just to readers whose focus is language in general, but to those who are particularly drawn to an integrational view. As a way of clarifying what is in those chapters, and the thematic connections between them, it would here be tedious to attempt to rehearse all the topics and the arguments which Toolan fully covers in over 300 pages; yet since neither can they be ignored, it would perhaps be more worthwhile to explore some of the above-mentioned implications for one reader, as they disturbed him. What does ‘integrational’ mean, and why take up so much space bothering about it? We live in an intellectual world in which most people whose business is to think about language pursue their linguistic endeavors on the basis of a number of assumptions which they take to justify what can reasonably be said within their discursive sphere. One nexus of such assumptions is that it is the function of a language to convey or express, that a language contains units of some kind for the purpose of fulfilling this function, and that a language has rules which determine how those units succeed in conveying or expressing. Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to George University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA 70148, U.S.A.
359
Wolf, Department
of Foreign
Languages,
360
G. WOLF
According to an integrational view, as becomes clear from Total Speech, there is no such thing as a language in this sense. But if this is true, then eo ipso a language does not convey or express anything, does not contain units, and has no rules. Rather, from an integrational viewpoint, a language in the above sense is a second-order, epiphenomenal intellectual construct based on a construal of certain types of behavior for certain purposes to which various larger cultural factors are seen as relevant. If in turn, however, the integrationist is right about this culturally dominant concept of a language, then it would appear to follow that if this language-concept-this languagemyth-is in fact not writ in nature but in culture, and if, given its mythical character, it is something that might be replaced by something unmythical, then the way is at least open for an integrational concept of language, if there is one. What would be unmythical? The integrationist aim appears to be to account for ‘the way things in fact are’. From one point of view, this seems a straightforward goal. Thus, consider the following two examples: (1) (guess) [which book Q’ [they remember (2) (guess) [[to whom]* Q’ [they remember
[I’ Q [to give I to whom I]]] [[which book], Q [to give r,tJ]]]]
According to a recent account, (1) is ‘a Wh-Island violation’, and ‘is barred’, whereas the ‘operation’ of (2) ‘is permissible’, even though in the end (2) while ‘convergent’, is said to be ‘deviant’ (Chomsky, 1995, p. 295). This is a textbook example of how, according to the above account, a rule is taken to determine how a unit of a language is to achieve its status as a unit. In the above examples, the rule applies in (l), so (1) goes through (at least in that it successfully exemplifies the rule, and so in that sense is acceptable), whereas (2) violates the rule, and so fails in this sense to be an acceptable unit. As for ‘the way things in fact are’, however, this is equally a textbook example of a point at the opposite end of the spectrum from the way things in fact are, since whether things are as the theorist says they are is indeterminable apart from dogmatic statement. That is, another theorist of the same school could take an opposing view and come up with an opposing rationalization, but it would be impossible to adjudicate between the opposing rationalizations since neither of them have any connection to anything anyone actually understands. A different view of the way things in fact are would be as follows. As unlikely as it may seem, both guess which book they remember to give to whom and guess to whom they remember which book to give have in certain contexts actually been uttered by speakersand were communicationally efficacious. Full stop. It would doubtless be possible to construe a contemporary textbook of English grammar such that both of these examples could be demonstrated to be ungrammatical or semantically deviant. But the point being made here is that this would be strictly irrelevant to the fact that they had been used efficaciously in daily communicational exchange. It is such a world that integrationism evidently sees itself as addressing. Within this world, of real people doing real things in real time, the integrationist sees communication via signs as being assessable in terms of parameters connected to what have been called the two basic axioms of integrational semiology (Harris, 1984 (1990, p. 225)). These are: I, What constitutes
of the situation
2.
proficiency
a sign is not given independently manifestation in that situation. The value of a sign is a function of the integrational presuppose.
in which it occurs
which its identification
or of its material and interpretation
REAL PEOPLE DOING REAL THINGS IN REAL TIME
361
These axioms highlight two spheres. One is the sphere of ‘context’; the other is the sphere of ‘integration’. From the point of view of context, according to the integrational doctrine of the sign, the sign, as a sign, is in no way predetermined prior to or outside of the context in which it is created. This is to say that the sign is created in and for the context in which it functions. This is a radical doctrine, and one perhaps hard to accept. But it has at least one initial advantage, that of being unequivocal. And it entails that there is no such thing as the linguistic sign as conceived by a linguistics which insists that what the linguistic sign is, is determined by rules, or principles, which transcend actual contexts. For there is no sign outside ‘the total speech act in the total speech situation’. And, as Toolan makes clear, both the total speech act and the total speech situation will never be seen again. From the point of view of integration, it is the function of the sign to integrate. This topic can be approached from several angles. Firstly, the sign itself is integrated into the communicational situation, which means that it cannot be separated from that context, it cannot be ‘decontextualized’, it is an integral part of it. Secondly, it is not the sign’s function to put into use a predetermined virtual value waiting to be realized, to give a perceptual form to concepts, or to give a conceptual form to physical objects. Rather, it is the sign’s function to integrate whatever is there to be integrated in a communicational situation. If X is going to pick up a few things and so may not be home at just the moment Y returns but will be home within five minutes, meaning that Y does not need to panic, go to the corner pay phone to contact someone, or try to get the extra key from the neighbor, then it is clear that the communication between X and Y which informs Y and coordinates the dual homecoming will involve the use of signs for the purpose of putting into a single communicational space activities, objects, intentions, assumptions, etc., from the past, the present, and the future. The sign or signs will integrate these things in a sense passively and in a sense actively; passively in the sense that it puts them all into the same space, and actively in the sense that a course of behavior will be determined, an attitude constructed, a mood preserved, a waste of time and energy averted, etc. Contextually, this very event has never happened, and will never recur. Integrationally, the signs constructed in the communicational act have never existed, and will never be reused. They were purpose-built for the occasion. Such is the background against which Toolan examines various concepts of current linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory. The first is that of ‘literal meaning’. Everyone is familiar with how the word ‘literal’ can be used, and few are upset when ‘I was literally roasting’ is in fact not uttered by a person one would consider ready to eat. But theorists have wanted more out of ‘literal’, viz. to roast> to cook, to cook> to prepare for eating. If we are prepared to follow the theorist’s strictures, we will take the utterance to be a misuse of language. If we do, however, we cannot fail to be struck by the conclusion that none of this has any ultimate bearing on what people actually say. That is, if we accept the integrational doctrine of the sign, then if someone says ‘I was literally roasting’, the word literally will derive its value from the communicational event in which it occurs (which will rarely have been preceded by rotation over a grill), and will derive no value from what a dictionary says. Once again, in so far as literal is a word with a meaning, our obligation to that meaning is derived from nothing more than a centuries-old habit of being taught from grammar books and consulting dictionaries. Metaphor fares no better here, in so far as it is definitionally based on literal meaning. For example if we are up the creek, is it not the case that we are not literally up any creek
G. WOLF
362
(would up be being used literally here?)? Metaphor may seem more difficult to give up than literal meaning, but this is only because it seems obvious that we are not in fact up a creek, and therefore the phrase has to be metaphorical. But if up, the, creek, and up the if in clinging to literal meaning we are begging the creek don’t have literal meanings, question of what up the creek means in the first place, then ‘metaphorical’, to the extent that it leans on the notion of literal meaning, has to end up as a circular, or vacuous, way of assessing what has been said. But surely we intend to use the phrase in a special way? Here, however, we seem to posit the mental furniture of lexical treasuries and Saussurean associationist groups, where when we use a sign we are picking it out of a lineup containing other possible choices of which we are equally aware. But it is highly doubtful that when people create signs for communicational contexts, which may evolve at a rate of speed faster than reflective mental activity requires, they are mentally comparing or choosing anything. In the ‘mental’ experience of communication, up the creek is what may occur to a speaker to say to his passenger when he is speeding away from the police and gets trapped in a cul-de-sac: it functions (integrates) in that context; it does not stand for something else. ‘Relevance’ seems at first to be more congenial to an integrational view, and Toolan to some degree presents it as such (‘Not the least of the reasons for detailed discussion of relevance theory here is that Sperber and Wilson espouse an attractively fluid notion of context, thoroughly congruent with the account of context and text proposed in my introductory chapter’ (p. 181).) As Toolan points out, ‘the intended meanings of utterances are said invariably to be calculable on the basis of an overarching principle of relevance’ (ibid.), and this principle is: Every utterance
communicates
the presumption
of its own optimal
relevance.
To simplify, this principle allows Sperber and Wilson to make it seem as if a ‘code theory’ of communication is not really necessary to an account of communication. Rather, the speaker/hearer is portrayed as engaged in a process of making inferences based on the presumed relevance of utterances: 1. A does something that ‘modifies’ B’s cognitive environment. 2.
Presented with A’s environment-modifying contribution, B chooses, from among those things now newly manifest (assumptions, facts, etc. now newly-or more strongly-makable), just those assumptions that are likely to be most relevant to B (p. 186).
It is on the basis of relevance in this sense, then, that communication can be accounted for as being successful. And relevance, unlike codes, can be taken to be a realistic parameter integral to the way people actually understand themselves as communicating. But Toolan is quite devastating about the final relevance of ‘relevance’ . And indeed, it becomes clear why relevance in Sperber and Wilson’s sense is incompatible with an integrational view. The main reason is that ‘relevance’, like rules and principles, is merely another engine designed to run the mechanism of language. Which means that, quite apart from any context, there will be a single, unchanging concept of what relevance consists in, outside of the context, and which is taken to guarantee successful communication. That this is not the way things in fact are can be seen to be obvious upon a brief pondering of the principle. For the principle is tantamount to claiming that everything anyone ever says is presumed to be as relevant as it can be: every utterance communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. As a matter of fact, this is as absurd as it can be. But more importantly for integrationism, it is transparently a principle which is
REAL PEOPLE DOING REAL THINGS IN REAL TIME
363
designed to adhere to utterances apart from any context. And this disqualifies it from being integrational. This is of course not to say that relevance is not a parameter of assessment for utterances. Rules also go by the board, but again this tends to be a conclusion that chafes. Perhaps more than the other concepts, we are loathe to give up the idea that our speech is governed by rules. After all, I am perfectly aware that idiolects around me have altered the function of -3, but as I do not wish to go along with this, when I speak I deliberately put -s on noun plurals where needed and retain it at the third person singular of verbs; except in the subjunctive, where I am determined to prevent it from being added. It is a rule for me that -s belongs where it belongs and when I speak I follow that rule or those rules. However, there are problems with the rules view. One is that, if I were asked to formulate the rule I am following I would run into difficulties. The primary reason for the difficulties is that apparent rules such as the use of 3rd person singular -s are not rules at all but historical contingencies owing to various sound changes. Of course, we can always say they have become rules, but when did this happen? And how? The point is that our belief that they are rules is just that. Yet how we use -s is in fact dictated not by previously existing rules, but by how we integrate a post hoc analyzable unit into the communicational situations in which we find ourselves. The attachment to the notion of rules is an a priori decision; we are not impelled to it by nature. A second problem with the rules view is that projecting the -s model onto the rest of our language breaks down at a fairly early stage, and if we contemplate the proportionately enormous amount of verbal activity that we engage in on a daily basis, it is evident that there is a huge proportion of it which no one has ever attempted to subsume under rules, simply because that activity is so vast, varied and novel in its nature. But if an enormous amount of our verbal activity is not even assumed to be rule-governed, then this shows that we are capable of communicating without rules; and if this is true, then rules are not necessary at any stage. From an integrational point of view, perhaps the simplest way of pointing out why rules are dispensable in our theory of language, is to recall that the communication situation, which is situated in time, is both unique and is itself in the process of changing. Real life, pace Saussure, is not digital, but analog. So if, when we are in a communication situation, we find ourselves where no one has ever been before, then it follows that any rules we can imagine for that situation will be a thin crutch with which to make our way. Both intentionality and repetition are topics Toolan discusses which are in some ways deeper and more recalcitrant than the more standard topics of modern linguistics. Toolan very interestingly introduces Condillac at the beginning of his chapter on intentionality, and later brings in an illuminating discussion of a theory of Knapp and Michaels. A good way into the topic is Kapp and Michaels’ basic premise: They argue that, contrary to the assumptions...of most contemporary theory (which ‘the attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account general’...(there is no gap between authorial intention and textual meaning for theoretical The meaning of a text or an utterance is simply and solely what the author intended it to
they understand as of interpretation in explanations to fill. mean (pp.l2l-122).
This is an excellent place to start because of the clarity of the position being stated, and because of Toolan’s contention that the position ‘merits close consideration, not least since, in their denial that there is any gap or gulf for theoretical explanation to fill as a necessary supplement, their argument is strikingly congruent with those that can be invoked in an integrational linguistic account of literal meaning and metaphor’ (ibid.).
364
G. WOLF
Yet clouds appear on the horizon of Knapp and Michaels’ premise. One of them is that either it is simply stipulated that authorial intention is to be the same as textual meaning, or we have something like a regress. For, given a meaning we have arrived at, how can we know whether it adheres to original authorial intent? (If the premise had been stated within the philosophy of law, the premise would have backfired; for the U.S. Supreme Court exists for the purpose of deciding what the intent of the authors of the Constitution was (here assuming an ‘authorial intent’ theory of U.S. Constitutional law). Surely Knapp and Michaels would not countenance a similar tribunal for literature.) A further difficulty implied by this position is that any appreciation of textual meaning which fell short or wide of authorial intention would be invalid. But surely generations of readers and theater goers have enjoyed Shakespeare and been ‘mistaken’ about various aspects of the plays. And doubtless many have legitimately enjoyed ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ whichever side of the fence they were on regarding whether Lennon and McCartney ‘meant’ it to be about LSD. The problem becomes thornier. For, in addition to the already difficult problem of interpretation, it introduces the even more difficult problem of what an author’s intention in fact is, in principle and in practice. Take, for example, the well known case of T.S. Eliot being asked what he meant when he wrote ‘three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’, and his response: ‘I meant “three white leopards sat under a juniper tree”. For even when we get back to the ‘author’s intention’ we cannot be sure if that is what we wanted to know, or whether we in turn understand the author’s intention even when it has been stated. Finally, it may genuinely be the case that some interesting aspect of a piece will be pointed out to its author, and the author will find that revelation to be valid; i.e. the author will acknowledge that what has been pointed out is certainly ‘there’, even though he or she wasn’t thinking about it when the piece was written. Indeed, one might almost expect this to be one benchmark of great literature: that sometimes there turns out to be more in the product than even the author intended. An integrational view of intention would appear to be simply that intention itself is as fully contextualized as the rest of what gives value to the sign. Thus intention, any more than meaning, relevance, rules, or anything else, cannot be a baseline parameter in terms of which a sign is guaranteed a value, because it itself is part of the context. ‘That’s not what I meant to say.’ But the integrational question is: what is the status of that statement in the context in which it was stated? Toolan cites Derrida, Searle, Hopper, and Tannen on iterability or repetition as central to the workings of language. Here a distinction needs to be made, and emerges in Toolan’s discussion of Tannen: In Tannen...repetition is singled out as a pervasive type of spontaneous prepatterning in conversation. seems to be a universal human drive to imitate and repeat, Tannen argues, which is of use in learning
There (p. 21).
The distinction is between the ‘drive to imitate’ and ‘repetition’ What can we infer from our observation that from a very early age children show a propensity to imitate? We cannot be sure. However, at least two considerations are worth pondering. One is the possibility that from our first interaction with children-i.e. beginning on the first day of their lives-we have a tendency to channel them into communicative patterns which show the influence of our own preconceptions, and that they are in a position (i.e. a relative poverty of communicational resources) naturally to respond to our initiatives. A second is that there is little warrant beyond fantasy to credit the newborn with a well-formed theory
REAL PEOPLE DOING REAL THINGS IN REAL TIME
365
of types and tokens, enabling it, for example, to cry in specified ways in order to obtain specified things. As will with luck have become clear from the above discussion, from an integrational perspective repetition is an epiphenomenon. That is to say, things being the way they are, we cannot ‘repeat’ anything if we accept that every communicational situation is unique. This does not mean that we cannot intend to repeat and then do so; it only means that any apparent repetition is in fact a new contextualization, and so a new sign: its repetitiveness is part of its new context (as of course it couldn’t have been before). The result of this-here Toolan throws much light on the issue-is that no theorywhether Derrida’s or Pateman’s iterability of signs, Tannen’s prepatterning and automaticity, or Hopper’s stable discourse formulas--can successfully use repetition as an anchor, not because people do not repeat, but because what it means to say that they do repeat does not provide the kind of entity which would validate theories, such as those just mentioned, which rest on a firm type-token distinction. One might raise one or two quibbles with a point or two made by Toolan in his introduction and in his chapters on literal meaning, further integrational principles, and iteration. For example, Toolan states: But this book intends to do more than lament linguistic wrong turnings. The purpose of delineating what arguments cannot hold is to highlight the aspects of language, and the assumptions about its cognitive bases in humans, that are foundational. As noted above, and offered in place of explanations in terms of languagespecific principles and rules espoused by those of a cognitive-mechanist persuasion, it is argued here that language draws primarily on quite general characteristics of humans (and, to a degree, of some other animals also). These can be summarized as the following partially overlapping attributes: faith; trust; orientedness to others; faculties of memory and imagination; goal orientedness; and the ability to perceive the relatedness and nonrelatedness of phenomena (understood as the perception of similarity and difference rather than of identity and difference). Among these attributes, I take orientedness to others to be preeminent... (pp. 1l-12).
But this is thin ice to be skating on for the integrationist who emerges from Toolan’s pages. The first yellow flag goes up at the term ‘foundational’. That is, if we accept the doctrine of contextualization, then the only acceptable foundation of the theory of communication is contextualization itself. This is underscored by Toolan’s choice of ‘general characteristics of humans’. For if we consider the communication that we daily engage in vis-a-vis Toolan’s chosen attributes, the same sense of unease may come over us as did in the discussion of ‘relevance’, and we may feel the shade of Grice hovering uncomfortably nearby. The fact is-and this is what we are integrationally interested in-that the contextualized, engaged, non-automatic nature of communication, the sense in which communicating with others involves physical, mental, and moral difficulties, does not allow us to make any assumptions, prior to communicating, about whether our interlocutor believes even a single thing we believe, whether he trusts us, whether he is paying attention, whether he remembers anything, whether he is discursively going anywhere, or whether he is able to make the connections between things which we want him to make. If these things could be guaranteed as foundational, there would be no point in communicating. Toolan leans a bit heavily on the foundational aspect of memory (pp. 31-32, 46, 147, 176, 227, 245-246) although in different ways which suggest his own lack of satisfaction with the notion. In a bold spirit he states: ‘I suggest that we learn and store lexical items, and even whole utterances, with contexts attached’ (p. 46; this is reminiscent of Ogden and Richards’ ‘engram’ theory). Later on, however, the position is much more nuanced:
366
G. WOLF
Memory is important to interaction, but not always in the most expected ways: perhaps its most important function is that it records the ways imagination has been successful, in the negotiation of meanings in context, in the past. Imaginative powers enable us to make rational assessments of what-given our awareness of the present circumstances and present agendas of interactants, together with awareness of how perceptibly related gestures, signs, and effects have been interpreted on past occasions (i.e. memory)-might possibly be going on in a current situation (p. 177).
Nevertheless, one wonders whether this account does not paint speakers as remarkably omniscient. Moreover, it seems difficult to reconcile a ‘recording’ function of memory with an integrational view of communication. The simple reason is that it portrays memory as a stable fund which can be drawn on. This view of memory is reinforced later on when Toolan states that ‘supplementing the guiding hand-for interpretation-of the assumed direction of the present talk will be each participant’s ordered and schematized memories of past situated uses (form-context pairings) of what we metalinguistically call ‘the words and phrases constituting the expression the best of both possible worlds’ (p. 245). But if we accept the integrational position, then we simply cannot accept an ordered and schematized memory as crucial to giving value to the sign, for the reason that people just do not have such memories, and even if they did, they would not enter simply into the communicational algorithm. If someone with whom I am talking says ‘the best of both possible worlds’, I may be in the fortunate position of being able to say (possibly to myself)... But what would I say? (It would be different if I said it to myself or to the interlocutor.) ‘Voltaire satirized Leibniz’s view that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ ‘He has mixed this up with the phrase the best of both worlds. ’ ‘Don’t you mean the best of both worlds?’ ‘Did you know that you were mixing up two different sayings?’ What exactly is it that I am remembering here? And what is my purpose in remembering it? The point is that what I call my memory of x itself becomes part of my present communicational context, and is createdfor it. There can be no stable, decontextualized content that I can reliably drawn on as the memory. We may think we remember exactly what we said and the exact context in which we said it. But this would simply be to assume that ‘context’ is itself decontextualizable. Rather, from an integrational viewpoint we craft a memory for the current communicational purpose. The anchors, then, have been weighed, and we have no choice but to navigate the seas. As mentioned, the above reactions have not been an attempt to rehearse Toolan’s points and arguments, but rather to explore some of the effects those points and arguments had on one reader. Indeed, it is not certain that Toolan would agree with the above attempts to sketch various integrationist positions, or with the criticism of his views from them, at least in part because the positions have a tendency to take on the kind of reductive, either/ or form which Toolan explicitly rejects in his introductory chapter. However, let us by a perhaps misguided principle of charity assume that the above characterizations of integrationist positions are to some degree accurate. Why then does Toolan go so easy on doctrines which by implication seem to have been definitively blown from the battlefield? In what way can anything be salvaged from segregationalist linguistic analysis, the treatment of languages as mechanistic codes, literal meaning, and extant methods whose application we are invited to revise not reject? The answer to this lies once again in the notion of context, and highlights both a deeper and broader aspect of integrationism which emerges as Toolan’s arguments develop. In short, in the West we have been living with a certain network of concepts since the time of
REAL PEOPLE DOING REAL THINGS IN REAL TIME
367
the Presocratics. For already at that early stage philosophers were grappling with the nature of language; and the Greeks came up with a certain answer. And it appears to be the case that, in so far as the Western civilization in which we live has been construed as ‘a footnote to Plato’, the problems we see ourselves as approaching today are taken within the same basic perspective as they were when Heraclitus wondered how words could mean anything if everything was always flowing. Yet this is the situation we are in; and consequently today’s theorist is in three minds, according to which (1) we simply accept the framework and plod on, all the while claiming that our theorizing constitutes ‘a radical break from the rich tradition of thousands of years of linguistic inquiry’ (Chomsky, 1995, p. 5); (2) we try to see our theoretical situation for what it is and then to get outside it if for no other reason than to discover whether it is even possible to look at things differently; (3) we recognize the concepts we have been using for centuries and try in a kind of therapeutic spirit (a) to approach those concepts critically somewhat a la Plato, and (b) to investigate the role those concepts play in our current attempts to understand ourselves and our place within our culture, world, etc. Integrationism would appear to leave room to operate somewhere in the vicinity of (2) and (3); Toolan is interested primarily in (3). Thus, one could claim: ‘Look, literal meaning, metaphor, intentionality, ‘relevance’, repetition, and rules are bogus concepts for language; so stop using them’; and it would be possible to do this, and to try to deepen our notion of context instead. Yet if we contemplate the project of jettisoning the words literal, metaphor, intention, relevance, repetition, and rules from our talk about talk we begin to see the difficulty of the enterprise in itself, as well as the implications for our relationships with other people who doubtless will be happy to go on using them. It is here that we begin to appreciate Toolan’s revised application of extant methods. How and why is literal used? What role does the idea that words and sentences have fixed meanings play in our culture? What exactly are we doing when we construct a linguistic theory? What is a linguistic theorist’s relationship to ‘lay speakers’? What is a language? These are integrational questions by virtue of the fact that we ourselves remain of necessity contextualized in the daily lives in which we communicate. And we do in fact tend to use ‘bogus’ words in spite of ourselves. However, integrationally we are free to use them in non-bogus ways. Thus an integrational project aims not so much at ‘let’s stop doing this and do something else’ as at the enterprise of understanding what we in fact do, and the ways in which even concepts we consider to be bogus play a role in our thinking about language. Of course, there is always (2) and it would even be possible to see Toolan’s (3) as a kind of preliminary therapy to, as he says, a ‘radical change in the way these notions operate as the foundations of contemporary theorizing about language and communication’. Here we arrive at the threshold of the distinction between criticism and theory. One of the most consistent sources of critical dissatisfaction with the integrational project during the last twenty or so years has been its apparent negative thrust. Yet, whether or not this criticism has been justified, there is now ample evidence in the field-as much of this book attestsof a genuinely new theoretical direction in studies of language and communication. The time is now overdue for orthodox linguistic thinkers themselves to integrate something of this new direction, even if polemically, into a style of discourse which in its segregation from all broader concerns can otherwise only circle its wagons so as to preserve the illusion of a safe haven of science on a hostile frontier of real people doing real things in real time.2
G. WOLF
368
NOTES ‘I have taken the title of this paper, with permission, from a remark made by Roy Harris in a separate connecreview was written before the reviewer had seen his book: Harris, R. (1996) Signs. Language Routledge, London and New York. *For a first step in this direction see G. Wolf and N. Love (eds), (1997) Linguisrics Inside Our: Roy Harris and his Critics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia.
tion. The present
and Communication.
REFERENCES Chomsky, Harris,
N. (1995) The Minima&
R. (1984)
Selected
Program.
MIT Press, Cambridge,
[ 19901 The Semiology of Textualization.
Writings of Roy Harris.
Routledge,
London
MA.
In N. Love (ed.) The Foundations and New York, pp. 2 I &226.
of Linguistic
Theory:
rights
reserved.
Printed 0271-5309/97
in Great Britain $17.00+0.00
PII: SO271-5309(97)00017-7
REAL
PEOPLE
DOING
REAL
GEORGE
THINGS
IN REAL
TIME’
WOLF
Michael Toolan. Total Speech: An Integrational Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Linguistic Approach to Language.
If there are readers sitting expectantly at the edges of their chairs hoping for a Kuhnian paradigm shift to sweep away generative grammar and its cognitivist scions, they may be initially disappointed by Michael Toolan’s new book. For the author studiously avoids any temptation to lead an absolutist crusade: So I wish to emphasize from the outset that this book is not ‘against’ segregationalist linguistic analysis and the treatment of languages as mechanistic codes; rather, it attempts to show the inadequacies of any thoroughgoing adoption and application of those principles (p. 3). The goal has not been wholesale rejection of the network of notions (literal meaning etc.) found to be suspect: each notion has played and continues to play an important role in various cultures’ thinking about language and society. What is argued for is the need for radical change in the way these notions operate as the foundations of contemporary theorizing about language and communication (p. IO). At the same time, it is arguable that what is chiefly required is not a new methodology but rather a revised application of extant methods. In this book, insofar as analytic methods and procedures are discussed, the latter view is advanced (p. 22).
Yet the subtlety and sweep of the book are such that it soon becomes clear that what appears to be protected by disclaimers becomes increasingly threatened by implication; and the book ends up being disturbing in unexpected ways, Toolan’s chapters (on literal meaning, metaphor, intentionality, relevance, repetition, and rules, with a middle chapter on further integrationist principles) will be of interest not just to readers whose focus is language in general, but to those who are particularly drawn to an integrational view. As a way of clarifying what is in those chapters, and the thematic connections between them, it would here be tedious to attempt to rehearse all the topics and the arguments which Toolan fully covers in over 300 pages; yet since neither can they be ignored, it would perhaps be more worthwhile to explore some of the above-mentioned implications for one reader, as they disturbed him. What does ‘integrational’ mean, and why take up so much space bothering about it? We live in an intellectual world in which most people whose business is to think about language pursue their linguistic endeavors on the basis of a number of assumptions which they take to justify what can reasonably be said within their discursive sphere. One nexus of such assumptions is that it is the function of a language to convey or express, that a language contains units of some kind for the purpose of fulfilling this function, and that a language has rules which determine how those units succeed in conveying or expressing. Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to George University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA 70148, U.S.A.
359
Wolf, Department
of Foreign
Languages,
360
G. WOLF
According to an integrational view, as becomes clear from Total Speech, there is no such thing as a language in this sense. But if this is true, then eo ipso a language does not convey or express anything, does not contain units, and has no rules. Rather, from an integrational viewpoint, a language in the above sense is a second-order, epiphenomenal intellectual construct based on a construal of certain types of behavior for certain purposes to which various larger cultural factors are seen as relevant. If in turn, however, the integrationist is right about this culturally dominant concept of a language, then it would appear to follow that if this language-concept-this languagemyth-is in fact not writ in nature but in culture, and if, given its mythical character, it is something that might be replaced by something unmythical, then the way is at least open for an integrational concept of language, if there is one. What would be unmythical? The integrationist aim appears to be to account for ‘the way things in fact are’. From one point of view, this seems a straightforward goal. Thus, consider the following two examples: (1) (guess) [which book Q’ [they remember (2) (guess) [[to whom]* Q’ [they remember
[I’ Q [to give I to whom I]]] [[which book], Q [to give r,tJ]]]]
According to a recent account, (1) is ‘a Wh-Island violation’, and ‘is barred’, whereas the ‘operation’ of (2) ‘is permissible’, even though in the end (2) while ‘convergent’, is said to be ‘deviant’ (Chomsky, 1995, p. 295). This is a textbook example of how, according to the above account, a rule is taken to determine how a unit of a language is to achieve its status as a unit. In the above examples, the rule applies in (l), so (1) goes through (at least in that it successfully exemplifies the rule, and so in that sense is acceptable), whereas (2) violates the rule, and so fails in this sense to be an acceptable unit. As for ‘the way things in fact are’, however, this is equally a textbook example of a point at the opposite end of the spectrum from the way things in fact are, since whether things are as the theorist says they are is indeterminable apart from dogmatic statement. That is, another theorist of the same school could take an opposing view and come up with an opposing rationalization, but it would be impossible to adjudicate between the opposing rationalizations since neither of them have any connection to anything anyone actually understands. A different view of the way things in fact are would be as follows. As unlikely as it may seem, both guess which book they remember to give to whom and guess to whom they remember which book to give have in certain contexts actually been uttered by speakersand were communicationally efficacious. Full stop. It would doubtless be possible to construe a contemporary textbook of English grammar such that both of these examples could be demonstrated to be ungrammatical or semantically deviant. But the point being made here is that this would be strictly irrelevant to the fact that they had been used efficaciously in daily communicational exchange. It is such a world that integrationism evidently sees itself as addressing. Within this world, of real people doing real things in real time, the integrationist sees communication via signs as being assessable in terms of parameters connected to what have been called the two basic axioms of integrational semiology (Harris, 1984 (1990, p. 225)). These are: I, What constitutes
of the situation
2.
proficiency
a sign is not given independently manifestation in that situation. The value of a sign is a function of the integrational presuppose.
in which it occurs
which its identification
or of its material and interpretation
REAL PEOPLE DOING REAL THINGS IN REAL TIME
361
These axioms highlight two spheres. One is the sphere of ‘context’; the other is the sphere of ‘integration’. From the point of view of context, according to the integrational doctrine of the sign, the sign, as a sign, is in no way predetermined prior to or outside of the context in which it is created. This is to say that the sign is created in and for the context in which it functions. This is a radical doctrine, and one perhaps hard to accept. But it has at least one initial advantage, that of being unequivocal. And it entails that there is no such thing as the linguistic sign as conceived by a linguistics which insists that what the linguistic sign is, is determined by rules, or principles, which transcend actual contexts. For there is no sign outside ‘the total speech act in the total speech situation’. And, as Toolan makes clear, both the total speech act and the total speech situation will never be seen again. From the point of view of integration, it is the function of the sign to integrate. This topic can be approached from several angles. Firstly, the sign itself is integrated into the communicational situation, which means that it cannot be separated from that context, it cannot be ‘decontextualized’, it is an integral part of it. Secondly, it is not the sign’s function to put into use a predetermined virtual value waiting to be realized, to give a perceptual form to concepts, or to give a conceptual form to physical objects. Rather, it is the sign’s function to integrate whatever is there to be integrated in a communicational situation. If X is going to pick up a few things and so may not be home at just the moment Y returns but will be home within five minutes, meaning that Y does not need to panic, go to the corner pay phone to contact someone, or try to get the extra key from the neighbor, then it is clear that the communication between X and Y which informs Y and coordinates the dual homecoming will involve the use of signs for the purpose of putting into a single communicational space activities, objects, intentions, assumptions, etc., from the past, the present, and the future. The sign or signs will integrate these things in a sense passively and in a sense actively; passively in the sense that it puts them all into the same space, and actively in the sense that a course of behavior will be determined, an attitude constructed, a mood preserved, a waste of time and energy averted, etc. Contextually, this very event has never happened, and will never recur. Integrationally, the signs constructed in the communicational act have never existed, and will never be reused. They were purpose-built for the occasion. Such is the background against which Toolan examines various concepts of current linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory. The first is that of ‘literal meaning’. Everyone is familiar with how the word ‘literal’ can be used, and few are upset when ‘I was literally roasting’ is in fact not uttered by a person one would consider ready to eat. But theorists have wanted more out of ‘literal’, viz. to roast> to cook, to cook> to prepare for eating. If we are prepared to follow the theorist’s strictures, we will take the utterance to be a misuse of language. If we do, however, we cannot fail to be struck by the conclusion that none of this has any ultimate bearing on what people actually say. That is, if we accept the integrational doctrine of the sign, then if someone says ‘I was literally roasting’, the word literally will derive its value from the communicational event in which it occurs (which will rarely have been preceded by rotation over a grill), and will derive no value from what a dictionary says. Once again, in so far as literal is a word with a meaning, our obligation to that meaning is derived from nothing more than a centuries-old habit of being taught from grammar books and consulting dictionaries. Metaphor fares no better here, in so far as it is definitionally based on literal meaning. For example if we are up the creek, is it not the case that we are not literally up any creek
G. WOLF
362
(would up be being used literally here?)? Metaphor may seem more difficult to give up than literal meaning, but this is only because it seems obvious that we are not in fact up a creek, and therefore the phrase has to be metaphorical. But if up, the, creek, and up the if in clinging to literal meaning we are begging the creek don’t have literal meanings, question of what up the creek means in the first place, then ‘metaphorical’, to the extent that it leans on the notion of literal meaning, has to end up as a circular, or vacuous, way of assessing what has been said. But surely we intend to use the phrase in a special way? Here, however, we seem to posit the mental furniture of lexical treasuries and Saussurean associationist groups, where when we use a sign we are picking it out of a lineup containing other possible choices of which we are equally aware. But it is highly doubtful that when people create signs for communicational contexts, which may evolve at a rate of speed faster than reflective mental activity requires, they are mentally comparing or choosing anything. In the ‘mental’ experience of communication, up the creek is what may occur to a speaker to say to his passenger when he is speeding away from the police and gets trapped in a cul-de-sac: it functions (integrates) in that context; it does not stand for something else. ‘Relevance’ seems at first to be more congenial to an integrational view, and Toolan to some degree presents it as such (‘Not the least of the reasons for detailed discussion of relevance theory here is that Sperber and Wilson espouse an attractively fluid notion of context, thoroughly congruent with the account of context and text proposed in my introductory chapter’ (p. 181).) As Toolan points out, ‘the intended meanings of utterances are said invariably to be calculable on the basis of an overarching principle of relevance’ (ibid.), and this principle is: Every utterance
communicates
the presumption
of its own optimal
relevance.
To simplify, this principle allows Sperber and Wilson to make it seem as if a ‘code theory’ of communication is not really necessary to an account of communication. Rather, the speaker/hearer is portrayed as engaged in a process of making inferences based on the presumed relevance of utterances: 1. A does something that ‘modifies’ B’s cognitive environment. 2.
Presented with A’s environment-modifying contribution, B chooses, from among those things now newly manifest (assumptions, facts, etc. now newly-or more strongly-makable), just those assumptions that are likely to be most relevant to B (p. 186).
It is on the basis of relevance in this sense, then, that communication can be accounted for as being successful. And relevance, unlike codes, can be taken to be a realistic parameter integral to the way people actually understand themselves as communicating. But Toolan is quite devastating about the final relevance of ‘relevance’ . And indeed, it becomes clear why relevance in Sperber and Wilson’s sense is incompatible with an integrational view. The main reason is that ‘relevance’, like rules and principles, is merely another engine designed to run the mechanism of language. Which means that, quite apart from any context, there will be a single, unchanging concept of what relevance consists in, outside of the context, and which is taken to guarantee successful communication. That this is not the way things in fact are can be seen to be obvious upon a brief pondering of the principle. For the principle is tantamount to claiming that everything anyone ever says is presumed to be as relevant as it can be: every utterance communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance. As a matter of fact, this is as absurd as it can be. But more importantly for integrationism, it is transparently a principle which is
REAL PEOPLE DOING REAL THINGS IN REAL TIME
363
designed to adhere to utterances apart from any context. And this disqualifies it from being integrational. This is of course not to say that relevance is not a parameter of assessment for utterances. Rules also go by the board, but again this tends to be a conclusion that chafes. Perhaps more than the other concepts, we are loathe to give up the idea that our speech is governed by rules. After all, I am perfectly aware that idiolects around me have altered the function of -3, but as I do not wish to go along with this, when I speak I deliberately put -s on noun plurals where needed and retain it at the third person singular of verbs; except in the subjunctive, where I am determined to prevent it from being added. It is a rule for me that -s belongs where it belongs and when I speak I follow that rule or those rules. However, there are problems with the rules view. One is that, if I were asked to formulate the rule I am following I would run into difficulties. The primary reason for the difficulties is that apparent rules such as the use of 3rd person singular -s are not rules at all but historical contingencies owing to various sound changes. Of course, we can always say they have become rules, but when did this happen? And how? The point is that our belief that they are rules is just that. Yet how we use -s is in fact dictated not by previously existing rules, but by how we integrate a post hoc analyzable unit into the communicational situations in which we find ourselves. The attachment to the notion of rules is an a priori decision; we are not impelled to it by nature. A second problem with the rules view is that projecting the -s model onto the rest of our language breaks down at a fairly early stage, and if we contemplate the proportionately enormous amount of verbal activity that we engage in on a daily basis, it is evident that there is a huge proportion of it which no one has ever attempted to subsume under rules, simply because that activity is so vast, varied and novel in its nature. But if an enormous amount of our verbal activity is not even assumed to be rule-governed, then this shows that we are capable of communicating without rules; and if this is true, then rules are not necessary at any stage. From an integrational point of view, perhaps the simplest way of pointing out why rules are dispensable in our theory of language, is to recall that the communication situation, which is situated in time, is both unique and is itself in the process of changing. Real life, pace Saussure, is not digital, but analog. So if, when we are in a communication situation, we find ourselves where no one has ever been before, then it follows that any rules we can imagine for that situation will be a thin crutch with which to make our way. Both intentionality and repetition are topics Toolan discusses which are in some ways deeper and more recalcitrant than the more standard topics of modern linguistics. Toolan very interestingly introduces Condillac at the beginning of his chapter on intentionality, and later brings in an illuminating discussion of a theory of Knapp and Michaels. A good way into the topic is Kapp and Michaels’ basic premise: They argue that, contrary to the assumptions...of most contemporary theory (which ‘the attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account general’...(there is no gap between authorial intention and textual meaning for theoretical The meaning of a text or an utterance is simply and solely what the author intended it to
they understand as of interpretation in explanations to fill. mean (pp.l2l-122).
This is an excellent place to start because of the clarity of the position being stated, and because of Toolan’s contention that the position ‘merits close consideration, not least since, in their denial that there is any gap or gulf for theoretical explanation to fill as a necessary supplement, their argument is strikingly congruent with those that can be invoked in an integrational linguistic account of literal meaning and metaphor’ (ibid.).
364
G. WOLF
Yet clouds appear on the horizon of Knapp and Michaels’ premise. One of them is that either it is simply stipulated that authorial intention is to be the same as textual meaning, or we have something like a regress. For, given a meaning we have arrived at, how can we know whether it adheres to original authorial intent? (If the premise had been stated within the philosophy of law, the premise would have backfired; for the U.S. Supreme Court exists for the purpose of deciding what the intent of the authors of the Constitution was (here assuming an ‘authorial intent’ theory of U.S. Constitutional law). Surely Knapp and Michaels would not countenance a similar tribunal for literature.) A further difficulty implied by this position is that any appreciation of textual meaning which fell short or wide of authorial intention would be invalid. But surely generations of readers and theater goers have enjoyed Shakespeare and been ‘mistaken’ about various aspects of the plays. And doubtless many have legitimately enjoyed ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ whichever side of the fence they were on regarding whether Lennon and McCartney ‘meant’ it to be about LSD. The problem becomes thornier. For, in addition to the already difficult problem of interpretation, it introduces the even more difficult problem of what an author’s intention in fact is, in principle and in practice. Take, for example, the well known case of T.S. Eliot being asked what he meant when he wrote ‘three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’, and his response: ‘I meant “three white leopards sat under a juniper tree”. For even when we get back to the ‘author’s intention’ we cannot be sure if that is what we wanted to know, or whether we in turn understand the author’s intention even when it has been stated. Finally, it may genuinely be the case that some interesting aspect of a piece will be pointed out to its author, and the author will find that revelation to be valid; i.e. the author will acknowledge that what has been pointed out is certainly ‘there’, even though he or she wasn’t thinking about it when the piece was written. Indeed, one might almost expect this to be one benchmark of great literature: that sometimes there turns out to be more in the product than even the author intended. An integrational view of intention would appear to be simply that intention itself is as fully contextualized as the rest of what gives value to the sign. Thus intention, any more than meaning, relevance, rules, or anything else, cannot be a baseline parameter in terms of which a sign is guaranteed a value, because it itself is part of the context. ‘That’s not what I meant to say.’ But the integrational question is: what is the status of that statement in the context in which it was stated? Toolan cites Derrida, Searle, Hopper, and Tannen on iterability or repetition as central to the workings of language. Here a distinction needs to be made, and emerges in Toolan’s discussion of Tannen: In Tannen...repetition is singled out as a pervasive type of spontaneous prepatterning in conversation. seems to be a universal human drive to imitate and repeat, Tannen argues, which is of use in learning
There (p. 21).
The distinction is between the ‘drive to imitate’ and ‘repetition’ What can we infer from our observation that from a very early age children show a propensity to imitate? We cannot be sure. However, at least two considerations are worth pondering. One is the possibility that from our first interaction with children-i.e. beginning on the first day of their lives-we have a tendency to channel them into communicative patterns which show the influence of our own preconceptions, and that they are in a position (i.e. a relative poverty of communicational resources) naturally to respond to our initiatives. A second is that there is little warrant beyond fantasy to credit the newborn with a well-formed theory
REAL PEOPLE DOING REAL THINGS IN REAL TIME
365
of types and tokens, enabling it, for example, to cry in specified ways in order to obtain specified things. As will with luck have become clear from the above discussion, from an integrational perspective repetition is an epiphenomenon. That is to say, things being the way they are, we cannot ‘repeat’ anything if we accept that every communicational situation is unique. This does not mean that we cannot intend to repeat and then do so; it only means that any apparent repetition is in fact a new contextualization, and so a new sign: its repetitiveness is part of its new context (as of course it couldn’t have been before). The result of this-here Toolan throws much light on the issue-is that no theorywhether Derrida’s or Pateman’s iterability of signs, Tannen’s prepatterning and automaticity, or Hopper’s stable discourse formulas--can successfully use repetition as an anchor, not because people do not repeat, but because what it means to say that they do repeat does not provide the kind of entity which would validate theories, such as those just mentioned, which rest on a firm type-token distinction. One might raise one or two quibbles with a point or two made by Toolan in his introduction and in his chapters on literal meaning, further integrational principles, and iteration. For example, Toolan states: But this book intends to do more than lament linguistic wrong turnings. The purpose of delineating what arguments cannot hold is to highlight the aspects of language, and the assumptions about its cognitive bases in humans, that are foundational. As noted above, and offered in place of explanations in terms of languagespecific principles and rules espoused by those of a cognitive-mechanist persuasion, it is argued here that language draws primarily on quite general characteristics of humans (and, to a degree, of some other animals also). These can be summarized as the following partially overlapping attributes: faith; trust; orientedness to others; faculties of memory and imagination; goal orientedness; and the ability to perceive the relatedness and nonrelatedness of phenomena (understood as the perception of similarity and difference rather than of identity and difference). Among these attributes, I take orientedness to others to be preeminent... (pp. 1l-12).
But this is thin ice to be skating on for the integrationist who emerges from Toolan’s pages. The first yellow flag goes up at the term ‘foundational’. That is, if we accept the doctrine of contextualization, then the only acceptable foundation of the theory of communication is contextualization itself. This is underscored by Toolan’s choice of ‘general characteristics of humans’. For if we consider the communication that we daily engage in vis-a-vis Toolan’s chosen attributes, the same sense of unease may come over us as did in the discussion of ‘relevance’, and we may feel the shade of Grice hovering uncomfortably nearby. The fact is-and this is what we are integrationally interested in-that the contextualized, engaged, non-automatic nature of communication, the sense in which communicating with others involves physical, mental, and moral difficulties, does not allow us to make any assumptions, prior to communicating, about whether our interlocutor believes even a single thing we believe, whether he trusts us, whether he is paying attention, whether he remembers anything, whether he is discursively going anywhere, or whether he is able to make the connections between things which we want him to make. If these things could be guaranteed as foundational, there would be no point in communicating. Toolan leans a bit heavily on the foundational aspect of memory (pp. 31-32, 46, 147, 176, 227, 245-246) although in different ways which suggest his own lack of satisfaction with the notion. In a bold spirit he states: ‘I suggest that we learn and store lexical items, and even whole utterances, with contexts attached’ (p. 46; this is reminiscent of Ogden and Richards’ ‘engram’ theory). Later on, however, the position is much more nuanced:
366
G. WOLF
Memory is important to interaction, but not always in the most expected ways: perhaps its most important function is that it records the ways imagination has been successful, in the negotiation of meanings in context, in the past. Imaginative powers enable us to make rational assessments of what-given our awareness of the present circumstances and present agendas of interactants, together with awareness of how perceptibly related gestures, signs, and effects have been interpreted on past occasions (i.e. memory)-might possibly be going on in a current situation (p. 177).
Nevertheless, one wonders whether this account does not paint speakers as remarkably omniscient. Moreover, it seems difficult to reconcile a ‘recording’ function of memory with an integrational view of communication. The simple reason is that it portrays memory as a stable fund which can be drawn on. This view of memory is reinforced later on when Toolan states that ‘supplementing the guiding hand-for interpretation-of the assumed direction of the present talk will be each participant’s ordered and schematized memories of past situated uses (form-context pairings) of what we metalinguistically call ‘the words and phrases constituting the expression the best of both possible worlds’ (p. 245). But if we accept the integrational position, then we simply cannot accept an ordered and schematized memory as crucial to giving value to the sign, for the reason that people just do not have such memories, and even if they did, they would not enter simply into the communicational algorithm. If someone with whom I am talking says ‘the best of both possible worlds’, I may be in the fortunate position of being able to say (possibly to myself)... But what would I say? (It would be different if I said it to myself or to the interlocutor.) ‘Voltaire satirized Leibniz’s view that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ ‘He has mixed this up with the phrase the best of both worlds. ’ ‘Don’t you mean the best of both worlds?’ ‘Did you know that you were mixing up two different sayings?’ What exactly is it that I am remembering here? And what is my purpose in remembering it? The point is that what I call my memory of x itself becomes part of my present communicational context, and is createdfor it. There can be no stable, decontextualized content that I can reliably drawn on as the memory. We may think we remember exactly what we said and the exact context in which we said it. But this would simply be to assume that ‘context’ is itself decontextualizable. Rather, from an integrational viewpoint we craft a memory for the current communicational purpose. The anchors, then, have been weighed, and we have no choice but to navigate the seas. As mentioned, the above reactions have not been an attempt to rehearse Toolan’s points and arguments, but rather to explore some of the effects those points and arguments had on one reader. Indeed, it is not certain that Toolan would agree with the above attempts to sketch various integrationist positions, or with the criticism of his views from them, at least in part because the positions have a tendency to take on the kind of reductive, either/ or form which Toolan explicitly rejects in his introductory chapter. However, let us by a perhaps misguided principle of charity assume that the above characterizations of integrationist positions are to some degree accurate. Why then does Toolan go so easy on doctrines which by implication seem to have been definitively blown from the battlefield? In what way can anything be salvaged from segregationalist linguistic analysis, the treatment of languages as mechanistic codes, literal meaning, and extant methods whose application we are invited to revise not reject? The answer to this lies once again in the notion of context, and highlights both a deeper and broader aspect of integrationism which emerges as Toolan’s arguments develop. In short, in the West we have been living with a certain network of concepts since the time of
REAL PEOPLE DOING REAL THINGS IN REAL TIME
367
the Presocratics. For already at that early stage philosophers were grappling with the nature of language; and the Greeks came up with a certain answer. And it appears to be the case that, in so far as the Western civilization in which we live has been construed as ‘a footnote to Plato’, the problems we see ourselves as approaching today are taken within the same basic perspective as they were when Heraclitus wondered how words could mean anything if everything was always flowing. Yet this is the situation we are in; and consequently today’s theorist is in three minds, according to which (1) we simply accept the framework and plod on, all the while claiming that our theorizing constitutes ‘a radical break from the rich tradition of thousands of years of linguistic inquiry’ (Chomsky, 1995, p. 5); (2) we try to see our theoretical situation for what it is and then to get outside it if for no other reason than to discover whether it is even possible to look at things differently; (3) we recognize the concepts we have been using for centuries and try in a kind of therapeutic spirit (a) to approach those concepts critically somewhat a la Plato, and (b) to investigate the role those concepts play in our current attempts to understand ourselves and our place within our culture, world, etc. Integrationism would appear to leave room to operate somewhere in the vicinity of (2) and (3); Toolan is interested primarily in (3). Thus, one could claim: ‘Look, literal meaning, metaphor, intentionality, ‘relevance’, repetition, and rules are bogus concepts for language; so stop using them’; and it would be possible to do this, and to try to deepen our notion of context instead. Yet if we contemplate the project of jettisoning the words literal, metaphor, intention, relevance, repetition, and rules from our talk about talk we begin to see the difficulty of the enterprise in itself, as well as the implications for our relationships with other people who doubtless will be happy to go on using them. It is here that we begin to appreciate Toolan’s revised application of extant methods. How and why is literal used? What role does the idea that words and sentences have fixed meanings play in our culture? What exactly are we doing when we construct a linguistic theory? What is a linguistic theorist’s relationship to ‘lay speakers’? What is a language? These are integrational questions by virtue of the fact that we ourselves remain of necessity contextualized in the daily lives in which we communicate. And we do in fact tend to use ‘bogus’ words in spite of ourselves. However, integrationally we are free to use them in non-bogus ways. Thus an integrational project aims not so much at ‘let’s stop doing this and do something else’ as at the enterprise of understanding what we in fact do, and the ways in which even concepts we consider to be bogus play a role in our thinking about language. Of course, there is always (2) and it would even be possible to see Toolan’s (3) as a kind of preliminary therapy to, as he says, a ‘radical change in the way these notions operate as the foundations of contemporary theorizing about language and communication’. Here we arrive at the threshold of the distinction between criticism and theory. One of the most consistent sources of critical dissatisfaction with the integrational project during the last twenty or so years has been its apparent negative thrust. Yet, whether or not this criticism has been justified, there is now ample evidence in the field-as much of this book attestsof a genuinely new theoretical direction in studies of language and communication. The time is now overdue for orthodox linguistic thinkers themselves to integrate something of this new direction, even if polemically, into a style of discourse which in its segregation from all broader concerns can otherwise only circle its wagons so as to preserve the illusion of a safe haven of science on a hostile frontier of real people doing real things in real time.2
G. WOLF
368
NOTES ‘I have taken the title of this paper, with permission, from a remark made by Roy Harris in a separate connecreview was written before the reviewer had seen his book: Harris, R. (1996) Signs. Language Routledge, London and New York. *For a first step in this direction see G. Wolf and N. Love (eds), (1997) Linguisrics Inside Our: Roy Harris and his Critics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia.
tion. The present
and Communication.
REFERENCES Chomsky, Harris,
N. (1995) The Minima&
R. (1984)
Selected
Program.
MIT Press, Cambridge,
[ 19901 The Semiology of Textualization.
Writings of Roy Harris.
Routledge,
London
MA.
In N. Love (ed.) The Foundations and New York, pp. 2 I &226.
of Linguistic
Theory: