|
[Semiology and Rhetoric, p.3-19]
p.5 Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts
p.5 Semiology... is the science or study of signs and signifiers; it does not ask what words mean but how they mean.
p.7-8 In a logic of acts rather than of statements, as in Austin's theory of speech acts, that has had such a strong influence on recent American work in literary semiology, it is also possible to move between speech acts and grammar without difficulty. The performance of what is called illocutionary acts such as ordering, questioning, denying, assuming, etc., within the language is congruent with the grammatical structures of syntax in the corresponding imperative, interrogative, negative, opative sentences. "The rules for illocutionary acts," writes Richard Ohman in a recent paper, "determine whether performance of a given act is well-executed, in just the same way as grammatical rules determine whether the product of a locutionary act - a sentence - is well formed... But whereas the rules of grammar concern the relationships among sound, syntax, and meaning, the rules of illocutionary acts concern relationships among people."
p.8-9 The sign is to be interpreted if we are to understand the idea it is to convey, and this is so because the sign is not the thing but a meaning derived from the thing by a process here called representation that is not simply generative, i.e., dependent on a univocal origin. The interpretation of the sign is not, for Peirce, a meaning but another sign; it is a reading, not a decodage, and this reading has, in turn, to be interpreted into another sign, and so on ad infinitum. Peirce calls this process by means of which "one sign gives birth to another" pure rhetoric [JLJ - ok, which explains why the internal conversation is necessary to "play" a complex game of strategy]
p.10 Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.
p.12 There can be... no sign without a referent.
[Tropes, Rilke, p.20-56]
p.28 Like iron filings under the power of a magnet, the verbal mass turns toward a single object that causes an eclosion [JLJ - emergence, as an insect from a pupal case] of an abundant poetic discourse.
p.31-32 The relationship between the two subjects or grammatical "persons" is so tight that it leaves no room for any other system of relationships. It is their interlacing that constitutes the text.
p.31 It is well known that these poems were written very quickly in a kind of euphoria
p.35 Everything seems to confirm that this poem can be considered a later version of the "correspondence" between the inwardness of the subject and the outside world.
[Genesis and Genealogy, Nietzsche, p.79-102]
p.88 The Birth of Tragedy... The property rights over truth that belong, by philosophical authority, to the power of language as statement, are transferred to the power of language as voice and melody.
p.91-92 the Dionysian condition is an insight into things as they are and it reaches truth by a negative road, by revealing the illusory nature of all "reality." The Apollonian appearance is the metaphorical statement of this truth; that actual meaning of the Apollonian appearance is not the empirical reality it represents but the Dionysian insight into the illusory quality of this reality.
p.100 The following statement occurs in preparatory outlines for The Birth of Tragedy:
Intelligence is justified in a world of aims. But if it is true that our aims are only a sort of rumination of experiences in which the actual agent remains hidden, then we are not entitled to transfer purposeful systems of action [Handeln nach Zweckvorstellungen] into the nature of things... Intelligence can only exist in a world in which mistakes can occur, in which error reigns - a world of consciousness.
[Rhetoric of Tropes, Nietzsche, p.103-118]
p.104 It is well know that Nietzsche's explicit concern with rhetoric is confined to the notes for a semester course taught at the University of Basel during the winter semester of 1872-73, with no more than two students present... It is also well known that Nietzsche's course on rhetoric was not original and drew abundantly on the textbooks that were current at the time in the academic study of classical rhetoric
p.105 [Nietzsche]
language is itself the result of purely rhetorical tricks and devices... Language is rhetoric, for it only intends to convey a doxa (opinion), not an episteme (truth)
p.107 [Nietzsche]
we have seen that the perceptions which one naively considers as determined by the outside world are much rather determined from the inside; that the actual impact of the outside world is never a conscious one... The fragment of outside world of which we are conscious is a correlative of the effect that has reached us from outside and that is then projected, a posteriori, as its "cause"
p.107 The outer, objective event in the world was supposed to determine the inner, conscious event as cause determines effect. It turns out however that what was assumed to be the objective, external cause is itself the result of an internal effect. What had been considered to be a cause, is, in fact, the effect of an effect, and what had been considered to be an effect can in turn seem to function as the cause of its own cause.
p.108 This entire process of substitution and reversal is conceived by Nietzsche... as a linguistic event... What is here called "language" is the medium within which the play of reversals and substitutions that the passage describes takes place. This medium, or property of language, is therefore the possibility of substituting binary polarities such as before for after, early for late, outside for inside, cause for effect, without regard for the truth-value of these structures. But this is precisely how Nietzsche also defines the rhetorical figure, the paradigm of all language. In the course on Rhetoric, metonymy is characterized as what rhetoricians also call metalepsis, "the exchange or substitution of cause and effect"
p.113 the very process of deconstruction, as it functions in this text, is one more such reversal that repeats the selfsame rhetorical structure. All rhetorical structures, whether we call them metaphor, metonymy, chiasmus, metalepsis, hypallagus, or whatever, are based on substitutive reversals
[Rhetoric of Persuasion, Nietzsche, p.119-131]
p.120 the proposition means; opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it [sollen]. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true [erkennen] but to posit [setzen] and arrange a world that should be true for us... the axioms of logic... are they a means and measure for us to create the real, the concept of "reality," for ourselves? ...The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true... In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continuously to confirm it... we are on the way to positing [setzen] as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is a "true world"
p.121 [Nietzsche]
In fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious truths [fingierte Wahrheiten] that we have created. Logic is the attempt to understand that actual world by means of a scheme of being posited [gesetzt] by ourselves, more correctly: to make it easier to formalize and to compute [berechnen]
p.122-123 The semiological moment... asserts that, for Nietzsche and Rousseau, conception is primarily a verbal process, a trope based on the substitution of a semiotic for a substantial mode of reference, of signification [bezeichen] for possession [fassen].
p.123 the text goes well beyond the assertion that the claim to know is just an unwarranted totalization of the claim to perceive and to feel.
p.124 Does this mean that we can now rest secure (though hardly safe) in the knowledge that the principle of contradiction is aberrant and that, consequently, all language is a speech act that has to be performed in an imperative mode? ...Is language an act, a "sollen" or a "tun," and now that we know that there is no longer such an illusion as that of knowledge but only feigned truths, can we replace knowledge by performance? [JLJ - Perhaps, there is an instinctual form of knowledge that is performative - a reflex action, for example, can it be "true"? Can the reflexive return of a high-speed tennis serve be "true"? It simply is, yet can be judged to be effective or not effective. A practical-and-practiced informed guess at how to "go on" is neither true nor false in a predicament which demands action - it just simply is what it is, nothing more nor less.]
p.126 [Nietzsche]
"there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; the 'doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything"
p.127 [Nietzsche]
"Logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious truths"
p.128 [JLJ - for Nietzsche] no act can ever be separated from the attempt at understanding, from the interpretation, that necessarily accompanies and falsifies it. The fictional truths, which are shown to be acts, are always oriented toward an attempt "to understand the actual world... to make it easier to formalize and to compute [berechenbar machen]..." and, in the later passage, thought is also described as "an artificial adjustment for the purpose of understanding [eine kunstliche Zurechtmachung zum Zweck der Verstandlichung]"
p.129 [Nietzsche]
"I maintain the phenomenalism of the inner world, too... everything of which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and through... and is perhaps purely imaginary"
p.129 The deconstruction of thought as act also has a different rhetorical structure from that of consciousness: it is not based on metalepsis but on synecdoche: " 'Thinking,' ...is a quite arbitrary fiction, arrived at by singling out one element from the process and eliminating all the rest, an artificial arrangement for the purpose of intelligibility." [JLJ - (Wikipedia) Kenneth Burke... described synecdoche as “part of the whole, whole for the part, container for the contained, sign for the thing signified, material for the thing made…cause for the effect, effect for the cause, genus for the species, species for the genus".]
p.129 Whereas the subject results from an unwarranted reversal of cause and effect, the illusion of thought as action is the result of an equally illegitimate totalization from part to whole.
[Excuses (Confessions), p.278-301]
p.281 As is well known at least since Austin, excuses are a complex instance of what he termed performative utterances, a variety of speech act.
|
