ETHNOLINGUISTIC NOTE 23

Links to pages: 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 372, 373, 374, 375

Comments Welcome

George W. Grace

University of Hawaii

January 7, 1985

ETHNOLINGUISTIC NOTES

Series 3, Number 23

ONGOING DISCOURSES

Ongoing discourses in the conception proposed here are open systems, or more precisely "intrinsically open systems" in the sense in which that term was used in Grace 1984b . This note, therefore, represents a further attempt at exploration in the vast terra incognita of open systems.

My objective here is to propose and explore the hypothesis that every instance of language use, oral or written, in any language has a discursive context, and that it is by reference to that discursive context that a hearer (or reader) is able to make sense of whatever was said (or written)(I suggested this in a very preliminary way in Grace 1984a , cf. pp. 55, 210). That is, each instance of language use is more or less specifically designed to contribute to some ongoing discourse. A necessary corollary of this hypothesis, of course, is that there exists a system of discourses which is exhaustive in the sense that it is capable of accommodating anything that it is possible (in some practical sense) to say.

Why (one may ask) is such a hypothesis worth investigating? Well, first of all, I should emphasize that I believe that if it is properly interpreted (and refined), it will turn out to be true. However, what is probably more important is what is to be learned from the attempt to work out that proper interpretation.

My interest in this matter arose initially out of my interest in the problem of translation--of whether or not the same thing can be said in different languages. I was finally forced to the conclusion that in the normal case it cannot, that the case which should be regarded as exceptional--as calling for an explanation--is precisely the case in which it is possible to say the same thing in different languages. This means that whenever it is possible, some kind of special condition exists. (1) What I propose is that the required special condition is the participation of both languages in the same ongoing discourse. In other words, it is possible to say the same thing in different languages just if the ongoing discourse to which this "thing" belongs is common to both languages.

My principal purpose here will be to make a first attempt to specify what should count as an ongoing discourse--and, therefore, as a potential discursive context. There are several different aspects of this problem which require discussion.

First, however, let me propose that we call that which requires the discursive context a "unit of discourse" or a discursive unit. The hypothesis, as I stated it above, was that "every instance of language use, oral or written, in any language has a discursive context". What I am proposing is simply to substitute the term "discursive unit" for "instance of language use, oral or written". A discursive unit, therefore, can be any speech act or the comparable act which produces a written text. Furthermore, it is important that it not be subject to any restrictions of size. It can be an obvious part of a larger such act, as a chapter, or even a sentence, of a book or an oral narrative. In such a case it will have a self-evident discursive context. On the other hand, the discursive unit can be the narrative or the book as a whole, or a single isolated utterance. It is especially in the latter type of case that identifying the discursive context becomes a matter of interest. In sum, the discursive unit is whatever unit we wish to consider in relation to its discursive context.

It should be apparent that I intend to give the term "ongoing discourse" a very general sense. In linguistics, "discourse" has been used especially to mean a linguistic expression of more than a sentence in length. I presume that there is an implication that such a discourse is governed by a single plan, that is, that it is planned as a unit. Such discourses would constitute just one kind of discourse in my sense. In the usage proposed here, a conversation involving any number of participants could also be a discourse. On the other hand, a particular conversation (or, for that matter, a particular monologue) would be divided between different discourses at any point where there was a sufficiently abrupt change of subject without any continuity-preserving transition.

Such discourses--a single narrative or exposition by a single speaker or an uninterrupted conversation--provide an obvious and immediate context for any of the discursive units which are included within them. For convenience I will refer to such an immediately ongoing discourse, when there is one, as the current discourse. However, the hypothesis which I am proposing obviously requires the existence of a large number of other discourses. These others are discourses which are more or less available to be recalled. At any given moment, then, there may or may not be a current discourse but, in any case, there will be any number of recallable discourses, i.e., discourses which are accessible to recall. According to the hypothesis, then, when we speak and are not continuing the current discourse, we are picking up and contributing to one of the discourses which was available to recall.

Recallable discourses are available in differing degrees to recall by a given individual. Otherwise said, each individual has his/her own system of recallable discourses, and some of these are more recallable than others. Of course, the sets of ongoing discourses which are accessible respectively to the speaker's and the hearer's recall are not likely to be identical. However, the speaker, if he/she is to be understood, must design his/her discursive unit so that it emerges from a discourse which is also accessible to the hearer.

As was pointed out at the beginning, ongoing discourses are intrinsically open systems in the sense in which that term was used in Grace 1984b. Therefore, there will not always be definitive answers to such questions as: How many recallable discourses are available to such-and-such person at such-and-such time?, or Is this particular discourse the discursive context of this particular discursive unit? A consequence of this indeterminacy, of course, is that there is nothing to prevent a unit's belonging to more than one discourse at the same time. In fact, it is evident that some discourses are much more general than others and that, often, more specialized discourses can be recognized as units within the scope of some more general discourse. Consequently it is to be expected that a unit may belong to a series of discourses, each more inclusive in scope than that which preceded it. Moreover, it is also to be expected that a unit may occasionally belong simultaneously to two or more discourses which do not differ significantly in size and which may not even overlap except to the extent of the one common discursive unit.

Let me review briefly what has been said so far. The proposal is that anything that is said or written (any "discursive unit") is a contribution to some larger ongoing discourse (its "discursive context"). Moreover, the claim is that it is only by means of these (always-present) discursive contexts that it is ever possible for anyone to understand anything that is said. A distinction was made between those discursive contexts which consist of an immediately current discourse--such as the letter in which a sentence appears or the conversation in which an utterance occurs--and discourses which are only available in the sense that they can be recalled--for example, an ongoing news story such as an election campaign or the continuing saga of the efforts by the Soviet Union to establish its rule in Afghanistan. However, there is a scale of recallability from (quasi-) perfect to non-existent.

Finally, we saw that, since ongoing discourses are intrinsically open systems, it is not always possible to give a definitive answer to the question of whether or not some particular ongoing discourse provides the context for some particular discursive unit.

There are several kinds of experiences (not necessarily mysterious heretofore) for which this concept of discursive contexts provides an interpretation. For example, the request to someone to make it clear "where he/she is coming from", or for that matter the simple question "what are you talking about?", may be seen as requests for further assistance in finding the appropriate discursive context. "Changing the subject" is usually changing the discursive context, and it is very usual when one is making such a change to mention, or otherwise provide some overt indication of, that fact.

Of course, a professional literature of any sort constitutes a discourse. When one attempts to read a contribution to the professional literature of a field with which one is more or less unfamiliar, one often finds oneself trying to imagine what had been going on in the preceding relevant literature. That experience seems to be aptly described as that of trying to "imagine up a (discursive) context".

A quite similar experience occurs when one attempts to read a contribution to one's own field made some years ago--before one's own monitoring of the literature began. A very common source of misunderstanding in reading such material comes from imagining the discursive context to be less exotic than it actually is (i.e., assuming that the author meant what someone producing the same [i.e., verbatim] discursive unit in today's circumstances would mean). Another example of misunderstanding having the same source occurs when the discourse of a professional discipline divides sharply into two (or more) sub-discourses, as in the case of a Kuhnian scientific revolution. It is common in such circumstances for participants in the older discursive tradition to misinterpret writings in the newer tradition precisely for that reason--the discursive context as they imagine it up is less exotic (from their point of view) than the actual discursive context envisaged by the writer.

There seems, for some reason, to be a strong motivation to establish a discursive context for one's pronouncements. To do so seems to be felt as providing them with a sort of legitimation. For example, I have long thought it noteworthy how frequently new movements of quite different kinds--political movements or new approaches within a profession such as linguistics--turn to history and seek to represent themselves as picking up and continuing some tradition (and usually one which is at least capable of being interpreted in the context of this note as a specifically discursive tradition) of the past.

Another presumably related practice is that of the literature review which commonly appears at the beginning of professional books or articles. This review is likely to assume particular prominence in an article or monograph which deals with a subject which has not previously been a conventional one in the literature of the field. In such cases the literature review may in effect construct a discursive context for the subject in question by bringing into a common perspective what various previous works--theretofore possibly regarded as quite disparate--have in common. That is, a new perspective is developed in which what had not previously been seen as constituting a common discursive tradition now is so perceived.

It is probably fair to say that, except where the discursive context is inescapably obvious (or perhaps where the author is particularly prominent--see the LeGuin quotation below), some sort of literature review to establish an appropriate discursive context is an indispensable requirement to having a work published in a professional outlet. (2) Here one might be reminded of Ursula LeGuin's statement (Wood 1982 : 18), "You must either fit a category or 'have a name' to publish a book in America." (And therefore, in order to get published she elected to write works which fit the category "science fiction").

But here we appear to be coming to something different. The problem of publishability for fiction works is similar to and yet different from that of the publishability of contributions to a professional literature. In view of my purpose in this note, it is tempting to attempt to interpret "fit a category" as "be recognizable without undue difficulty as belonging to a particular ongoing discourse". It does seem evident that there is a continuity of some sort involved in fitting a category.

The problem is, this continuity is not one of subject matter in any narrow sense. Up until now we have been talking about discursive units which could be thought of as characterized predominately by their subject matter. Placing them within a discursive context has been regarded as primarily a matter of recognizing where their subject matter fit. But Ursula LeGuin's case is not quite the same. The continuity seems to be one of what we might call "genre" (whatever that is).

Might we stretch the notion of ongoing discourse to include continuities of this sort? There is much that is similar. Within fiction (and other literary writing) there are ongoing traditions and innovation within these traditions, and each innovation in some measure alters the tradition. These traditions are, therefore, quite analogous in this respect to subject-matter oriented discursive traditions. However, what was just said about literary traditions could be extended to all other artistic traditions, and there we seem to be getting rather far from the original conception of ongoing discourses. I am obliged, then, to concede that here we have traditions of a rather different kind which need to be kept distinct.

There are further problems of this sort of which I am aware. For example, consider greetings (or the instruments of phatic communion generally). Does a greeting actually pick up some discourse? If so, what sort of discourse? Do all of the greetings exchanged by two people who greet each other regularly constitute an ongoing discourse in themselves? Or should the discourse be conceived more broadly to include all other formules de politesse (good bye's, thank you's, etc.) that pass between the two? Or should it be conceived still more broadly so as to encompass all, or virtually all, that passes between the two protagonists? It certainly seems evident that between any two people who interact regularly there is some kind of continuity in their casual exchanges--greetings, small talk, etc., which is not a continuity of subject matter.

Or for that matter should the set of participants be widened to include others who in some sense belong to the same group of people and generally share the same phatic patterns? I think that the conclusion must be that the typical instance of language use is situated within several different ongoing traditions. If it has any subject-matter content at all (for an explication of "content", see Grace 1984a, esp. pp. 51-59), it is to be counted as a discursive unit, and it may be assumed to have a discursive context. But if it has any phatic (as I am using that term here) content (and probably all instances of language use do involve phatic content), it fits into some kind of ongoing phatic tradition as well. Furthermore, the genres of which we spoke above may well require us to recognize a third kind of ongoing tradition into which everything we say (or write)(or perhaps just some of the things we say or write) must be fitted. I will not attempt here to say anything more about how all of these things are to be analyzed. It is worth noting, however, that these considerations suggest that we are very constrained indeed as to what possibilities are open to use should we wish to speak; it seems clear that there are strong limitations of various sorts on what it is, for all practical purposes, possible to say.

Some Implications

One of the things which this hypothesis seems to imply is that everything that anyone says, or at least everything said which has subject-matter content, is in part suggested to the speaker by an ongoing discourse. It leads us to suspect that it never even occurs to anyone to speak about anything that is not already a conventional subject for discussion. The implication is that whenever we speak, we are, among other things, responding to things which have been said before. And in responding to them, we are also in some sense responding to the things to which they were responding, and so on. That is, each discursive unit is largely shaped by the discursive context into which it is designed to fit, but the immediate discursive context is, in turn, shaped by a larger context, etc.

In what, then, might originality consist? What is peculiar about a remark or a whole volume that we perceive to contain "original" ideas? I think that part of the answer would be that an idea tends to be regarded as original to the extent that its discursive context is not a stereotypical one (although I am not sure whether or not that is the only factor). In the most original work, the author is likely to have, in effect, assembled a discursive context for him/herself out of disparate, sometimes not very accessible, ongoing discourses.

Another apparent implication, which I do not find unattractive, would be that the history of human language has been a history of gradual proliferation of discursive traditions. That is, a tradition grows and becomes more elaborate, and therefore provides an increasingly large and varied range of potential discursive contexts (a greater variety of things which might be said as contributions to that particular discourse). It also may differentiate into distinguishable sub-traditions, each of which qualifies as an ongoing discourse in its own right. And so, gradually our ontologies, our "conceptual worlds" (as I call them in Grace 1984a, e.g., 155ff.), have become enriched to their present point.

NOTES

1. The nature of the special condition was suggested by the concept of discourse in the work of Michel Foucault (especially Foucault 1976 ). I have not always been sure how well I have understood him, and I am therefore not at all sure how much of what I have said here would be acceptable to him. However, at the very least I must acknowledge my indebtedness to him for the stimulus which I received from his work.

Foucault spoke of such discourses or "discursive formations" as being governed by rules, and Rorty's concept might suggest a similar interpretation. Since the general notion of various kinds of behavior being rule-governed is a quite popular one right now, one can easily understand why it might appear attractive to conceive of discourses as being governed by rules. And they are as much so as are many of the kinds of behavior which are ordinarily thought of as rule-governed. However, this kind of conceptualization tends to paint a misleading picture of how they work and especially to obscure their openness--precisely what I want to avoid. Back up

2. That is natural because any work which does not closely adhere to the traditions of a profession is simply not professional work, and the outlets of which we are speaking are consecrated to particular professions. Back up .