The world correlate chapter 5

Every day sublime and the wholeness of discourse.

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Written in English and translated to English

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

    This essay propose a first theoretical approximation to Stephen A Tyler focusing in discussing from certain number of his essays around language. As we stephen is the founder of linguistic anthropology besides his previous cognitive one which ever place lexical, semantique and even pragmatiques in the forefront, the turn linguistic however started started a major change, linguistic started to not used as by analogues or homologies to study non linguistic phenomena, but the study of language started to be priorized.

  It adquiered in stephen two form, studies of language to the study of culture and a more contemporary theoretical work less focused in studies of culture and more around discussing language issues as an abstract discussion, this last moment is the one I am more interested about.

  This chapter will focuss things related to our philosophical dialogues and overall to his wonderful paper in response to me Evocation: The unwriteable: a response to Abdel Hernandez sj of 97, but also to presenter displays, prolegomena to the next linguistic, them others voices without mirrors, postmodern ethnography and a point of order

   Evocation: The Unwriteable might be considered as his essay that more notably represent the Stephen progressive turn to philosophy something to a certain point present in a certain sprit of philosophy and philosophical anthropology precisely in his more theoretical essays such as those of linguistic.

   Although the theory of language is yet pivotal in this essay it is free toward philosophizing language making explicit a certain affinities of Stephen to late twenty century European thinkers such as Deleuze and Derrida as well as to expressionism in general

   The problem of expression, however, major in that essay, and understanded not as much in the sense of a philosophical style or a position in philosophy respect to the should be or the duty and telos, but as an issue to be discussed is not indeed discussed by deleuze but by derrida in an essay I am constantly making references focused in the relation between form and the wishes to say written around hurssel, Two essays of Derrida, the former mentioned and another one also on hurssel focusing genesis and structure are thus going to be majors to understand my current analysis on Stephen response to me

   But besides that essay of derrida on the stratus of expression is developed as a phenomenology of language, the pre-expressive noetic and eidetic in regard to the expressive as to language, the Stephen attention toward expression focused before well in overlining he empties spaces of indetermination that limit language in respect to the expressive intentions result excessive to what it represent or express from our thoughts

(…) Languages are always inadequate in themselves. First, they are excessive. They do more, effect more than their structures or the intentions of their users can account for or desire. Secondly, they are always lacking. They neither adequately express our intentions nor fully represent the things for which they are substitutes. Either too much or too letlee, they are simultaneously more and less than their representations and expressions, as judged either by their failure adequately to express our inner thoughts or represent outer facts.

     Stephen assigned on the other hand an ontological place to evocation before outside and after outside language before a language is considered as a complexioned effective and concrete reality in writing or later between its readers and listener’s silences, so as what occupy or inhabit the space that language itself can’t comply

   It is about ontology, on the one hand, in terms of expression, the expresably or expressed thanks to evocation, an implicit allusion to the games of words from which take shape some of his man titles such as the unspeakable, the said and the unsaid, etc, something that locate evocation in regard to the space and time of a being ready to express him or herself toward a language, meaning the horizont of what he defined as “The affinities Between being and the timeless time of the present, on the one hand, and between becoming and the present-anticipated future “.

(…) evocation is essential to language. No language could function either as representation or communication without it,

 Evocation, in short, is what makes languages work. It fills the spaces and times languages cannot inhabit. It bridges the gaps between words and occupies the empty margins of texts and the silence of speakers and hearers. It connects the meanings dispersed by the lineal trajectories of syntagms and paradigms. It is the unsaid that enables the saying and the said. It is the unspeakable of linguistic, but it is not itself unspeakable. It makes the tropes work but it is not itself a trope. Evocation then, is not about tropes, except in the sense that tropes would be ineffective without it.

   But on the other hand he place evocation around what he defined as affinities and differences with the Kantian sublime

(…) The affinities between being and the timeless time of the present, on the one hand, and between becoming and the present-anticipated future, on the other hand, are particularly suspect. Evocation, again as you aver, dispenses with the idea of being-as-present-object and entails instead an idea of becoming that has not temporal locus, but inhabits all determinations of time and collapses within itself the possibilities of cause, origin and telos.

 (…) If evocation enables this curious past/present of remembering, but is not determined by or in the past, what is the time of evocation---the present, the future?. It is none of these, for it involves itself as you say, in the eclipse of this threefold time. Recall that time, and also space, are posited by Kant as intuitions because they are the necessary conditions of any representation. Thus, if evocation is not part of the program of representation, it is free of the necessities of both time and space. This does no mean, however, that evocation is somehow excluded from determinations of representation. It is, in fact, also necessary to any representation in order for the representation to be adecuated to what it represents.

 (…) It is akin to the Kantian sublime but, unlike that notion, is not restricted to contexts of aesthetic judgment. It is, after all, an enabling condition of the commonsense world, and our everyday discourse would not be possible without it.

 (…) It has nothing of the awesome or monstrous about it. It is at the opposite pole of the extreme situations of judgment and perception Kant predicated for the sublime. We might call it an “every day sublime” as a way of capturing both its affinity to and difference from the aesthetic sublime.

 (…) Still, I hesitate to advocate completely the disassociation of evocation and writing, if for no other reason than that evocation is necessary to writing. Evocation that can be written is not evocation, but it is not therefore, absent from writing, for if it were absent there could be no writing. Writing depends on the activity of evocation and cannot found itself without it

   The interest on the quotidian is by first time thematized by Stephen with this essay from the moment he discuss our current cultural situation in usa discussing crucial contemporary circumstances in the country such as the theme of the modern hubris spectations of technology solutions, the issue of the virtual, the situation with the rhetoric’s and aesthetics of the modes of discourses of the medias, radio, television, internet, etc, as well as the issue so current of our circunsantance of cultural identity in the united states focused from the perspective of subjectivity of the relations between identity and difference, the issue of the nomadic deterritorialized and hybrid subjectivities major to those of us who are emigrants in the united states, its relevance in the composition of culture, thus as in general our subjectivity in capitalism, the consequences of multiculturalism and the cultural process defined americanicity between anglosajonidad and native cultures such as Amerindians and Afro-Americans

(…) we are daily surrounded, not only in print, but even more in its surrogates, radio, television, cinema, and the internet with presentations that have the form of objective discourse, but whose purposes serve interests that have nothing to do with truth, but are instead toward persuasion, objective and subjective.

(…) There is no technological solution, and it is typical of our hubris that we should think that there is one. We are prone to forget that every technological solution is just another problem, or the same old problem in a new form.

Evocation can be captured neither in the duality of opposition nor in the separated poles of opposition that make the discourse of identity. Evocation is not then, a concept indicating the identity of an essence, positive or negative. We know it neither as an essence nor as the concept of an essence.

    However, although Stephen seems to place evocation in a before and an after outside language, meaning, as something external to it by all its side, diachronic, the previous universe or anticipated between being with it expressive motivations toward language, present, the sublime of the quotidian in the triple present and after, the empty spaces of silence let by the readers, listeners and writers, something also confirmed by the relation he stablish between evocation and the semantique memory of the body, the pascheins, the body and its passions, and zetezis, episodic memory evolved in the cognitive processes of memorization and remembering, he also on the other side, recognize that evocation belong or is related to language first through those same empty silence spaces let by readers, listener and writers as to plenty the dispersed meanings of the linear trajectories of sintagms and paradigms, and second, or majorly, since evocation is recognized as that which make possible language to work both in the form of special language and in the common sense one from tropes impossible to be effectives without evocation, to writing and representation impossible without evocation as to be in the case of representation more or less adequate

   The former leads us to the fact that Stephen place evocation not only in an ontological level before language between expression and the taking shape of it but also because since evocation determine the adecuation of representation and writing it is evolved also within our organization of discourse