Becker and the New Philology

Becker and the New Philology Excerpts from: Becker, Alton L. Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995. Print.

Becker meets Pike • On my return from Burma in 1961, I came to Michigan to study with Kenneth Pike. That missionary in Burma had loaned me Pike's book on tone languages, and I had learned a great deal form it, particularly what it means to say that the language I was learning was a tone language. Pike gave me, among many terms, the word emic. As he often said to his students, the observer is always part of the data, and we should strive for an emic perspective, an empathy with the perspective of the engaged user not just that of the detached observer. The term came from the word phonemic. Phonemics (in contrast to phonetics) is the study of the sound distinctions that make a difference in a particular language. We all can make and hear different sounds, but only some are used to distinguish the words of our language. Many forms of writing are based on the representation of “differences that make a difference.” In his classes, Pike taught us, using subtle problems from Native American language, methods of distinguishing the emic from the etic. He extended this idea beyond sounds to encompass all of the distinctions a language makes. --pg. 17

Pike’s Tagmemic Heuristic • Particle, Wave, Field < physics • phone > phoneme = other –eme’s • tagmeme: synonyms are allo-senses • Merely a tool? just a hammer? to build, or to destroy? • If a tool: a spun-glass probe so delicate that it breaks down wherever it finds resistance (Becker at CCCC, 1992)

Context-shaping • An “episteme”—a way of knowing—seems not to be an abstract thing, although, like a grammar, it can and usually has been represented abstractly. An episteme has its full being in individual persons, in their minds and bodies, not in some abstract realm of Platonic ideas. Constrained as we are by the many dimensions of the context we live in, it still seems to me that the transactions of consciousness happen particularly in particular individuals. --pg. 14

Text and Context • From the first point of view, constraints common to all languages tend to be structural (or logical); from the second, pragmatic (or rhetorical). What I call philology might also be called a rhetorically based linguistics. --pg. 189

Particularity • A truly interpretive linguistics, a linguistics of particularity, has yet to appear. --pg. 73 • But segmentation into linear sequence is a prerequisite for doing linguistics as most of us have been taught it: normally, sounds string together to make morphemes and words, and words string together to make phrases, and so on. --pg. 195

Grammar: fact or cultural artifact? • One can get the feeling that from grammar school to graduate school the prime use of grammar has been some variety of intimidation. --pg. 188 • Grammars and dictionaries are as much cultural artifacts as newspapers or shadow plays. --pg. 194

Code and Context-shaping • We commonly speak the language as a code, with thoughts as the “input,” the stuff that is encoded. But what if language extends down into the very ways we shape our experiences, store them, and retrieve them, and is not only a means of communicating them? The code metaphor seems to limit languaging unduly. --pg. 8

Definitions of Philology • As an intellectual discipline, philology can be defined as the text-centered study of language. Philologists have traditionally set themselves the task of making ancient and foreign texts readable. Only part of this task is simple translation, since any careful philologist knows that few foreign words have translations. Words and phrases must be described, often in great detail, not merely mapped onto a foreign term. --pg. 25

New Philology • In a multicultured world, a world of multiple epistemologies, there is need for a new philologist—a specialist in contextual relations—in all areas of knowledge in which text building (written or oral) is a central activity: literature, history, law, music, politics, psychology, trade, even war and peace. --pg. 26

Goal of Philology • The goal of the philologist is to guide outsiders (here non-Javanese) to what might be called an aesthetic understanding of a text. To achieve an aesthetic understanding it seems reasonable to say that in interpreting a text, the outsider must be aware of his own differences — particularly those most “natural” to him—and must learn to use new conventions of coherence, invention, intentionality, and reference. --pg. 60

Deficiency and Exuberance • As a first step it is useful to list the exuberances and deficiencies, following Ortega's axioms for a new philology. • Every utterance is deficient. • Every utterance is exuberant. • Note that Ortega says “every utterance,” not just some. The paradox works even in the most intimate conversation, but the deficiencies and exuberances are almost overwhelming when one is approaching a distant text. --pg. 80

Kinds of Relations • Unlike language (which many linguists see as their field of study), discourse (the field of modern philology) is studied in relation to a complex set of external constraints, grouped by Ricouer into these kinds of relations: • (a) temporality, relation to a particular time of utterance or writing; • (b) subjectivity, relations to a particular speaker or writer; • (c) referentiality, relations to nature, the referential worlds; and • (d) intersubjectivity, relations to hearer or reader (as a potential speaker or writer) who depends upon his experience in the other role — that is, as speaker or writer — to help him interpret the text. --pg. 262

Linguists and philologists would recognize, I think, at least six different kinds of context for any chunk of language from sentences on up to whole texts: • (1) the context of other language before this chunk or after it within the text (thinking of text as any recorded instance of languaging); • (2) the context of the language act itself, in which someone is languaging to someone, somewhere, sometime; • (3) the context of memory — the prior texts and remembered contexts this bit has the power to evoke; • (4) the context of a world beyond languaging, a world we observe through words, whatever we may believe about the ontology of that world — so that if I way “Look at Bill over there” I don't normally mean for you to look at my words but through them; I mean them to be transparent; • (5) the context of the medium — sound, inscription, gesture, and the neural medium of inner languaging we call thought. None of these five kinds of context can be reduced to one of the others, and all are within a context we might call • (6) the context of silence — the unsaid (in any particular utterance) and the unsayable (in any particular language.) --pg. 237

Substitution Frames • The actual a priori of any language event—the real deep structure—is an accumulation of remembered prior test just like the one studied here: particular prior texts, acquired from particular sources. From the perspective of particularity, generality is a kind of epiphenomenon produced by the reshaping of a particular prior text to a new context. And our real language competence is access, via memory, to this accumulation of prior text. --pg. 86

Repetition and Variation • Cf. the dual duties of Watkins’ bard: preserve the tradition and sing a new song • All language activity, including literature, involves, then, variation between spontaneity (present) and repetition (past) and communicates on at least two levels, the lexically expressed message (L) and the relational message (Lm). --pg. 28

Temporality and Causality • Inter-sentence coherence in Indo-European languages is achieved primarily by tense. • Clarity and coherence means to speakers of these languages linear temporal/causal sequencing. • [This is not the case in all other language families.] --pg. 33

Coincidences in one eternal round • The time enacted within wayang is unconstrained, except that it must be simple. Coincidences are timeless. But the performance of a wayang is symbolically a single day. --pg. 43

Wayang: Shadow Plays • In the coincidence of epistemologies, as just noted, the real subtlety of wayang appears. The major epistemologies are • (1) that of the demons, the direct sensual epistemology of raw nature; • (2) that of the ancestor heroes, the stratified, feudal epistemology of traditional Java; • (3) that of the ancient gods, a distant cosmological epistemology of pure power; • (4) that of the clowns, a modern, pragmatic epistemology of personal survival. --pg. 40

Shadow-Plays and the Spirit World • It is movement out and back, a trip. This structure may well reflect the origin of wayang as an instrument of communication with the dead via trance. --pg. 41 • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJGE3m7BEng&feature=related

Indonesian Dalang = Indo-European Bard • After the mantra and a set musical interlude, the dalang brings out the puppets for the first scene, and begins the description of the first scene of the first pathet of the lakon, using fixed phrases. --pg. 56

Etymology in the Wayang • Etymologizing is the descriptive part of a scene (either janturan'description of a place' or carios 'description of a prior action'), is done by the dalang directly, and is serious. --pg. 56

Why Modern vs. Postmodern • With regard to the other part of this book title, Modern Philology, a friendly Javanese translator once asked me why anyone would want to be moving toward something modern in a postmodern time (pascamoderen, he said, a nice blend of a word out of Sanskrit-Javanese and Romance). So much for stages. The only answer I could think of was that maybe, in philology, we haven't become modern yet. --pg. 20

Becker and the New Philology