In the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that experience is always of "a world, that is [...] an indefinite and open multiplicity in which relations are relations of reciprocal implication."(1) This is a discursive, or ecological, interpretation of "experience" which echoes both the earlier and contemporary interpretations of John Dewey, Gregory Bateson and Norbert Wiener, and provides a point of conjunction between modern phenomenological theories, pragmatism, and cybernetics. To a certain degree, this conjunction will have seemed improbable, due to the assumed incompatibility of phenomenological idealism and the material grounding of pragmatism—and yet this is not the case, at least in the restricted sense in which "experience" is given as something structural and structurally synthetic.
An appreciation of the importance of synthetic structures is characteristic of such work as Bateson's "Cybernetic Explanation" (1967) and Wiener's Cybernetics (1948), both of which evolve a notion of structural mechanics and quasi-systematicity that proceeds from Einstein's general relativity, according to which the purpose of mechanics—the science of motion—is to describe how bodies change their position in space with time.(2) For Einstein, there can be "no such thing as an independently existing trajectory," just as there can be no picture of the world that can assume the function of an "inertial frame of reference" which is not a purely normative one. The discursivity of Einstein's conceptualisation gives to the world, as it were, a linguistic complexion, in which semantic situations are always relational and dynamic, and while we may describe their "means of explanation" (as Wittgenstein says) by way of an abstract or analytic grammar, the situations themselves—obtaining "in the world" or as world-states—remain inflected or synthetic.
For Merleau-Ponty, the experiential world defined as "an indefinite and open multiplicity in which relations are relations of reciprocal implication" likewise follows from Einsteinian relativity in positing experience in terms of a global set of integrated and mutually affective co-ordinates. The logical consequence of such a definition is that we are lead, according to Merleau-Ponty, to an idea of "reality" which is "intrinsically and in the last analysis a tissue of probabilities."(3) The linguistic complexion inherent to this idea of reality—one which is conditional for a semantics and not dependent upon any a priori semantic structure—is more clearly established by Merleau-Ponty in his reading of Ferdinand de Saussure, in an essay addressed to Sartre entitled "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence":
What we have learnt from Saussure is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs. Since the same can be said of all signs, we may conclude that language is made of differences without terms; or more exactly, that the terms of language are engendered only by the differences which appear among them.(4)
What does it mean, however, to describe language as "differences without terms"? And if we begin by assuming language to be differential, what does this imply for a synthetic or discursive view of experience?
Dewey, in the Essays in Experiential Logic, attempted to address this question in a nascent form by means of a critique of the inherited Cartesian dualism of experience and reflective thought.(5) Dewey's particular formulation can be rendered in terms of a distinction in the relationship between grammar and semantics—here characterised as the antecedents (or situation) and datum (immediate material) of thought, and thoughts "objectives" (the progress of any thought function, i.e. its organisation of material). By "datum of thought," Dewey was referring to "a distinction which is made within the thought-process as a part of and for the sake of its own modus operandi." "It is," he concludes, "a status in the scheme of thinking."(6)
In linguistic terms, what we are presented with here is an assertion that while grammar is not an instrument of semantics, the contours of semantic possibility are conditioned by the grammatical situation and the disposition of linguistic "data" (such as phonemes or lexemes). In short, language thus conceived remains "a tissue of probabilities." The co-implication of grammar and semantics requires us to approach the idea of linguistic experience in broadly synthetic terms, as a function of open possibility in accordance with a finite set of probabilities. Here, then, is the necessary conjunction of the phenomenological and the pragmatic: in the "reciprocal implication" of material conditions and what is called meaning. However, before we become habituated to thinking that we have in some way demonstrated that the experiential world is linguistically contoured, it is important to consider the complimentary view: that we have instead arrived at an idea of language contingent upon the structure and organisation of what we call thought.
In either case, what presents itself most forcefully in this relation to possibility (whether in linguistic, experiential or phenomenological terms) is the synthetic nature of this "reciprocal implication." By synthetic it is meant situational—that something is inflected by virtue of its condition within a "system of co-ordinates," as it were—that, as Dewey says, there is no "mere existence—phenomenon unqualified as respects organisation and force, whether such phenomenon be psychic or cosmic [...]."(7) It is for this reason that thought is seen as not being independent of its "antecedent" conditions, but is bound up in them as conditions for thought. Similarly Wittgenstein, arguing against the "ideal language" fallacy—that meaning exists a priori—insisted that meaning in language is indistinguishable from its grammatical situation: "Let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of investigation into what a word really means."(8)
In the Blue Book (1933–34)—a text devoted almost exclusively to the question of "what is the meaning of a word?"—Wittgenstein identifies a formal relativity as the basis for any discussion of sign operation (being the axial relation of language and the mechanics of thought). Among other examples of grammatical situations that Wittgenstein proposes in support of this view, is the phenomena of homonymy—in which the same word can have more than one meaning—and of antonymy—in which two words with contrary meanings may be differentiated by as little as a single letter or phoneme. The relativistic and synthetic character of homophony had previously been identified by Freud in his study of Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1916), in particular with respect to the operation of puns. For Freud, homonymy is exemplary not only of certain effects associated with the unconscious, but of a particularly structural relation between verbal and graphic forms of symbolisation and the organisation of "sense." In other words, homonymy reveals something about the synaesthetic and material nature of cognition or thought.
Nowhere is the significance of homonymy more evident, however, than in the writing of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), for it is here that the synthetic, and synaesthetic, condition of linguistic experience is most fully elaborated by foregrounding the homonymic ambivalence that underwrites the entire field of language and, consequently, of thought. As Joyce writes: "What can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for."(9)
Joyce's linguistic "experiment" draws our attention to the highly probabilistic way in which language—or rather the possibility of language—is organised. In Finnegans Wake the relation between a probabilistic grammar and semantic possibility is radicalised through the structural and affective aspects of the text's "unity," or synthetic complexion. This is an effect that Gregory Bateson, writing forty years ahead of Deleuze and Guattari, termed "schismogenesis"—loosely analogous to Merleau-Ponty's "indefinite and open multiplicity in which relations are relations of reciprocal implication." For Bateson, affective unities describe transverse structures in which "the whole body of behaviour is a concerted mechanism"; while structural unities describe structures in which "the behaviour of any one individual in any one context is, in some sense, cognitively consistent with the behaviour of all other individuals in all other contexts."(10)
As with Joyce's paronomasia and compound—or portmanteau—"words" and cyclical "narrative structures," Bateson's schismogenesis points to the way in which, beyond an apparent surface of sense, "language" operates by means of a co-ordinate mechanism of what—echoing Saussure's differential system of signs—Bateson calls symmetrical differentiation and complementary differentiation (e.g. homonymy and antonymy), by which an otherwise "purely probabilistic" nature of signification acquires its design. This design is conditioned not by any intentionality concealed behind language, but by a formal constraint: a constraint whose definition is limited solely by the possibilities open to any given linguistic situation. Consequently we may think of design as a term designating invention, or the possibility of "making sense" of, or by virtue of, unforeseen conditions. In terms of Finnegans Wake, the remarkable thing is not that its design makes of language something exotic, but that it opens our eyes—as it were—to the unforeseen nature of language's commonplace, material conditions.
It is here that we may identify what it is that Bateson means by constraint, as something conditional for language (thought, etc.) to happen, and yet as something inherent to language; not as a regulatory idea applied from outside, but as a techne of language. In cybernetic terms, "the course of events," as Bateson explains, is likewise "subject to constraints, and it is assumed that, apart from such constraints, the pathways of change would be governed only by equality of probability. In fact, the 'constraints' upon which cybernetic explanation depends can in all cases be regarded as factors which determine inequality of probability."(11)
Evidence of such inequalities of probability can be found in the fact that "experimental" texts like Finnegans Wake continue to yield to processes that we may still call processes of reading—even at those points at which "language" otherwise appears to lapse into mere probability: to lapse, in other words, into noise and randomness, in the distribution of marks on the page or sounds represented "in the mind." Literacy in this sense appears to be linked to circuits of constraint or what we might call "error tolerance," by which probability remains attached to a structural dynamic rather than a closed circuit of mechanistic inertia or entropic dissipation. Consequently it is in the mechanisms of literacy—rather than by a purely mechanistic calculus—that the possibility of "making sense," of invention or poiesis, remains open.
While the discursive relation between inequality of probability and possibility of necessity underwrites the entire linguistic project, the base material aspect of this relation is perhaps most exemplified in those parts of Joyce's text—among others—that seem most remote, indeed even hostile, to semantic "reconstruction." Noteworthy in this respect are Joyce's so-called thunderwords ("Housefather calls enthreateningly. From Brandenborgenthor. At Asa's arthre. In thundercloud periwig. With lightning bug aflash from afinger"(12)): a set of ten quasi-lexical entities, each made up of one hundred (and one of one hundred and one) letters arranged in seemingly arbitrary combinations, whose purpose—it is assumed—is to provide an onomatopoeic rendering of the sound of thunder. As, for example:
Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.(13)
Marshall McLuhan has argued that Joyce's thunderwords can be read as recounting a history of technology, comprised of ten phases: 1. Paleolithic to Neolithic; 2. Clothing as Weaponry; 3. Specialisation; 4. Markets and truck gardens; 5. Printing; 6. Industrial Revolution; 7. Tribal man again; 8. Movies; 9. Car and plane; 10. Television.(14) What is perhaps more interesting than the techno-historical schema Joyce's thunderwords are supposed by McLuhan to represent, is the way in which Joyce's writing itself can be regarded as technological, demonstrating a fundamental relation of interdependency—indeed a techne—operating between, for example, verbal signification and noise. Onomatopoeia has often been considered a "special case," but this is upon the assumption that a representation (or mimesis) of noise remains incompatible with verbal representation as formal language—due, in other words, to the radically analogical character of onomatopoeia and the implied anti-mimeticism of its claim over phonic "substance" as constitutive of a "signified." By orientating the signified in its materiality—as what conditions and yet escapes meaning—onomatopoeia thus what might be called a mark of the real in language, consonant with the claims of Saussure regarding the substantive element of difference marked out by the enunciative forms of certain phonemes (/ta/ /ba/ /pa/, for example), or by such conventional graphic traits as the point, the line, and the circle which, by various permutations, account for the geometry of alphanumeric inscription. In onomatopoeia language is thus "restored" to what we might call its fundamental, gestural condition—as situationally inflected—whereby deviation, probability and error tolerance are less the affects of linguistic systematicity than they are of a generalised signifiability, materially conditioned.
If onomatopoeia (the making of words or names) recalls to language a seeming pre-linguistic, material relatedness to noise—to something pre-ontological or id-like—it also points to a future advent of the sensible as what Jacques Lacan terms an intermediate point between language and reality.(15) Its liminality, in this sense, between the one and the other, reminds us that language (thought) operates within a dimension of synthetic spatio-temporality—or what Joyce calls the "FUTURE PRE- / SENTATION / OF THE PAST."(16) As with Einstein, Joyce shows us—to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty—that at a certain distance "a present is contemporaneous with a future."(17) The implications of this for the way in which we understand language (thought) are, however, a long way from being self-evident, largely due to the incomprehensible nature of simultaneity. Indeed, it appears to us only in the deviation from simultaneity—by way of a mode of the analytic—that "understanding" itself becomes possible. Given a simple phrase from a text like Finnegans Wake, such as "hearasay in / paradox lust,"(18) we find it impossible to proceed sensibly beyond the first term hearasay without analysing it (or translating it) into distinct, a priori semantic units—such as hearsay and heresy—and to reconstruct a posteriori the sense of a "narrative intertwining" of the meanings of these two words (such as, that hearsay, as a deviation from directly attested truth, or doctrine, is constitutive of heresy, thereby "attesting" to a semantic co-implication that is graphically approximated in the term hearasay).(19) The complementarity of "hearsay" and "heresy" in the term "hearasay" renders the singularity of hearasay unreadable, other than in the sense that we are able to recognise it as a singularity.
Simultaneity thus deviates into reconstruction, and yet it does so by virtue of a prior possibility of deviation, or rather of discursivity—being that condition of "indefinite and open multiplicity" that describes the root of discourse. As with Einsteinian mechanics, discourse thus conceived deviates between inertial frames of reference moving in multiple directions and a generalised polyvalence or "simultaneity of relations" (between co-implicated terms): a simultaneity not in time or space, but across time and space—just as, in Saussure, simultaneity describes a relation of differences without terms. This engagement with the notion of simultaneity represents a problem we find recurring particularly in philosophical discussions of thought, mind and consciousness—especially with regard to the analytic-synthetic phenomenon of reflexivity. Among the very numerous efforts to grapple with this phenomenon under the effects of simultaneity, or semantic co-implication, one of the more interesting—in that it commences upon the notion of discursivity and deviation—is to be found early on in Dewey's Experience and Nature (1929).
According to Dewey: "the meanings that form mind become consciousness, or ideas, impressions, etc., when something within the meanings or their application becomes dubious, and the meaning itself needs reconstruction. This principle explains the focal and rapidly shifting traits of the objects of consciousness as such."(20) For Dewey, all "conscious perception" involves a risk, since it involves not only a venture towards the unknown limits of possibility, but also the necessity of deviating from the known in order not to be reduced to the operations of a mere automaton. Once again the discourse of consciousness is located in the "gap" between a mechanistics of probability and the horizon of the possible—describing, in the process, what is undoubtedly a mechanism of deviational necessity—further elaborated here in Art as Experience (1934):
There is always a gap between the here and now of direct interaction and the past interactions whose funded result constitutes the meanings with which we grasp and understand what is now occurring. Because of this gap, all conscious perception involves a risk; it is a venture into the unknown, for as it assimilates the present to the past it also brings about some reconstruction of the past. When past and present fit exactly into one another, when there is only recurrence, complete uniformity, the resulting experience is routine and mechanical; it does not come to consciousness in perception. The inertia of habit overrides adaptation of the meaning of here and now with that of experiences, without which there is no consciousness, the imaginative phase of experience.(21)
This formulation is far from unproblematic, but we can find here a movement towards a concept of recurrence that is deviational because synthetic, and which informs the different grammars of the words "mechanical," "mechanistic" and "mechanism" as they have been employed in this essay so far. For Dewey it is clear that the mechanical represents a Cartesian disavowal of the particular, variable, or contingent (Merleau-Ponty's "tissue of probabilities") in the constitution of thought—or what Dewey terms "conscious perception"—the imaginative phase of experience.(22)
It is evident that "mind" in Dewey's formulation does not equate to some kind of metaphysical, fictive entity assumed in place of a material agency, but rather an organisation of experiential phenomena into a global set of integrated and mutually affective co-ordinates.(23) This synthetic view of "mind," which is not an a priori or normative agent, remains distinct from the Cartesian "theatre of the mind" and rationalist assumptions about the mechanistic operations upon which consciousness, and the experienced world, are founded. In rejecting the "routine and mechanical," Dewey does not thereby reject a material basis of experience, but rather "locates" experience in the situational or synthetic aspect of materiality—where each situation constitutes a singularity or open possibility within the probabilistic framework of its transverse linguistic contours. The paradigm of "mind" thus extends into an "historical" world view that is not only experiential but experimental.
"In the history of man," Dewey argues, "the individual characteristics of mind were regarded as deviations from the normal, and as dangers against which society had to protect itself. Hence the long rule of custom, the rigid conservatism, and the still existing regime of conformity and intellectual standardisation." As a consequence, the development of modern science—or of modernity per se—began only when "there was recognised in certain technical fields a power to utilise variations as the starting points of new observations, hypotheses and experiments. The growth of the experimental as distinct from the dogmatic habit of mind is due to the increased ability to utilise variations for constructive ends instead of suppressing them."(24) In more general terms, we can find in Dewey's conception of "individual characteristics of mind" something analogous to the meaning of singularity as it obtains in terms of recursive yet non-identical structures—whether in language, cognition, of other (physical) systems—in short, what we have termed synthetic situations. This usage of the term "situation" is itself derived from Dewey's earlier work in the Essays in Experimental Logic, and we are entitled to interpret the constructivist or utilitarian overtones of the passage cited above as an attempt to account for something like a generative grammar, by which "mind in its individual aspect is shown to be the method of change [...] in the significances and values attached to things,"(25) and thought in its discursive aspect is restored to the open possibility of a venture into the unknown.
(c) Louis Armand, 2006