The arming of the hero

Today I drove to Virginia to pick up my newly repaired laptop, which had been suffering from a mechanical ailment of the hard drive spindle. Poor creature. It is better now, and on the way back, I somehow managed to enjoy the hour and a half of unfortunate rush hour traffic by means of contemplating the many delicious varieties of flash card I will be making for myself in the next several weeks. Whether this is a healthy or unhealthy sign, I will leave as an open research question.

It is now a mere two months (good heavens!) before my exams, and I have read nearly all of the novels on my list (which is not to say that I do not need to revisit them, and commit to memory various pieces of vital information about them), some of the poetry, and a goodly chunk of the theory. I think it is now time to move into a new phase of preparation, which I am thinking of as the period of arming myself. Towards this goal, I've been thinking about things that are not necessarily actually connected to my own research project, but instead trying to anticipate the concepts that will spark other kinds of connections and reactions in people in my home discipline. Any suggestions of this kind of term and association that occur to anyone out there in the ether as good addtions to my list, by the way, would be thoroughly welcome. It's surely useful to have a repertoire of interesting (brief!) things to say that anticipate or acknowledge those associations. Here's the start of some thinking along these lines:

When I talk about "convention", I'm often thinking about things like the distinction between conventional and conversational implicatures -- as in cases like like this, a pair of sentences I worked on briefly in the pragmatics course I took last semester:

a. I don’t think your solution works.
b. I think your solution doesn’t work.

There's some kind of implicit meaning going on here, leading us to understand that something like (b) is implied by (a). Sentence (b) isn't simply entailed by (a) -- the assertion in (b) is stronger. You might not think that the solution worked, while not going so far as to think that the solution fails to work, instead remaining agnostic on the question, and under the right circumstances, (a) could be used to express just this (weaker) state of mind:

Anne: You think my solution works, don’t you?
Bob: No, I don’t think your solution works – I don’t know whether it works or not!

The strengthening implicature presented in (2) arises from an R-type (Horn 1984) implicature involving politeness. This kind of implication relies on the speaker’s recognition of the fact that people would like to say only as much as necessary to get their point across to fill in the full strength of the attenuated negation found in the actual remark. What's interesting here is that this is not just a one-off calculation; there is in general a pervasive tendency among listeners to pragmatically strengthen negation. This phenomenon works a lot like other kinds of euphemism, and seems to me to be a case of what Morgan (1978) calls “short-circuited implicature.” Short-circuited implicature is somewhere between calculated implications and conventional associations between forms and meanings. It is so common, so conventional to express (b) by saying (a) that, although the implicature is calculable, it may cease to be actually calculated by many speakers:

R-based implicata, while calculable (as all conversational implicata must be), are often not calculated on line, but partially built in; a specific form of expression may be associated with a given pragmatic effect while an apparently synonymous form is not… I don’t guess that φ allows a strengthened ‘neg-raised’ understanding in only a subset of the dialects for which I don’t think that φ does. (Horn 2004, p. 12).

But my colleagues who study literature in light of new historicism, postcolonial theory, Marxian theorists, Lacan, et cetera, doubtless have quite other associations with the idea of convention. It's my hope to anticipate a few and prepare discussions of how my interest in convention intersects with (or doesn't intersect with) their interest. My first stop is going to be a visit to the treatment of societal and other conventions in postcolonial theory -- I think Homi Bhabha is going to be the right place to look there, probably in The Location of Culture. This is dangerous, I know, in that it involves wandering off-list, but useful in that having it on-hand will make me feel immensely more confident and competent when I come into contact with some of the areas of my home discipline where I feel less at home. On the topic of convention, still, I also need to think about the idea of "conventionality" as it fits in with the issues of class, culture, and formal experimentation in the Edwardian, modernist, and in-betweeny (i.e. the literature of the thirties; the generation of the high Modernists' younger siblings, more or less) fiction I've been reading recently.

Another area that could benefit from this kind of thinking: I feel there's something useful and even potentially deep to be said about some of the thematic resonances between the illusory transparency of intention and the modernist project, which is, after all, in many and complicated ways involved with inveighing against a particular model of transparency proposed by the classic realist novel. The modernist novel is both aware of and resistant to use of privileged language, and resists the notion that "the real can be displayed and examined through a perfectly transparent language," as Colin MacCabe describes the Victorian realist practical theory of the relationship between language and its denotata, in James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1979, p. 18). Whether or not it is entirely fair to attribute this philosophy to the Victorian novels and authors that went before, this tendency is indeed one thing against which the modernist novel positions itself. (The complications of the ways and facets of how this antipathy plays out deserve some discussion too, to be sure. I have some good thoughts on this, which I will try to translate from scritchy notes into actual prose this weekend. But I am already going on rather, and I want to sketch in the general outline of my point, which is this:)

Nonetheless, the apparent transparency of the intentions behind our utterances is a crucial ingredient, it seems, in functioning as communicators in the world. Without the assumption that we can make ourselves understood even as we underspecify, there would be no ceiling on our need to check, recheck, repair and elaborate in attempting to confirm that we have adequately made something known to our interlocutor. More on transparency and its illusory (or not!) nature soon, and repeatedly, I suspect.

(discussion)

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