[lit-ideas] Re: Must the Word be Literate?
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 10:44:06 +0900
On 10/2/07, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> Is this question not somewhat naively put?
Perhaps.
>
> 1) A religion or superstition may or may not claim that its 'rites',
> including linguistic 'rites', correspond to some "absolute Truth" - but what
> kind of claim is this, or is its denial? It is surely a claim that is highly
> metaphysical and indeed perhaps itself of a kind of religious or
> superstitious character.
Perhaps, again. But there is no denying that modern philosophers
ranging from Leibniz to the early Wittenstein took quite seriously the
notion that an ideal language could be constructed in which all and
only true statements about the world could be uttered. Historically
speaking, this effort seems rooted in quite common earlier beliefs
about primordial words that when uttered by deity, priest or magician
shape or reshape the world.
>
> 2) The idea of a performative utterance may be used here.
Indeed it can. The thesis that magical incantations are, in effect,
performatives was explored in the 1980s by Harvard anthropologist
Stanley Tambiah. This was one of three approaches my paper explored.
The others were James Fernandez's thesis that rituals are extended
metaphors and metaphors ways of moving pronouns around in cultural
manifolds and Maurice Bloch's proposition that the formalization of
ritual language is a way of asserting authority by limiting variation.
In the case of the exorcism whose language I examined, I discovered,
first, that most of what was said was, in fact, a protracted
negotiation designed to establish the conditions under which the the
final "Begone" would be performative. But this was clearly only part
of what was going on. Fernandez's thesis pointed to the ways in which
the patient afflicted by demons, the demons, the scapegoat, and the
Taoist magician performing the right changed places as the rite
proceeded. Bloch's argument about formality pointed to close analysis
of the range of registers involved in the rite: from highly informal
to rigidly formalized.
Cheers,
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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