Against “concepts” and “definitions” and for “our difference making,
distinction making” speech
— the power of specific ‘textual formations’
“Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a
thing really is, is told us by its definition. Ever since Socrates we have been taught that
reality consists of essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are
known whenever we know their definitions. So first we identify the thing with a concept
and then we identify the concept with a definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing
is whatever the definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of it
or the full truth about it” (James, 1909/1996, p.218).
“When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have
fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion
and rest exclude each other; approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence;
unity excludes [end 253] plurality; independence excludes relativity; 'mine' excludes
'yours'; this connexion excludes that connexion – and so on indefinitely; whereas in the
real concrete sensible flux of life experiences compenetrate each other so that it is not
easy to know just what is excluded and what not” (James, 1909/1996, p.254).
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People live within ‘circumstances of practical concern’ to them — and what they ‘care about’,
what ‘matters to them’, works to organize what they attend to and respond to in those
circumstances.
As result of their living immersion, their engagement with those circumstances, as they ‘move
around’ within them — attending to a fragment here at this moment in time, another fragment
there at that moment in time — they gradually come to a unitary sense of ‘its’ nature in its
mattering to them.
The unity is a particular, unique, unity, still open to further development, that we need to
understand in terms of itself, rather than in terms of another, external, eternal, ideal world of our
own creation as academics.
These movements of feeling arouse quite specific action guiding anticipations within me1 — where
my task is to ‘go on’ to take a next step in the circumstance in question, that is intelligible to all
the others around me.
To do this, I must act in an accountable fashion, that is, in a way that can be verbal described in
such a way that the others around me — living within the same ‘circumstances of concern’ — can
find my actions as ‘fitting into’ that specific circumstance.
Here, it is my ‘speakings’, my utterances, my expressive bodily movements that work to arouse in
those around me tensions, “feelings of tendency” (James), “anticipations” (Bakhtin) of what might
‘come next’ in my language intra-twined activities, my language intra-twined practices.
This is all quite different from what is of concern to academics, living intellectually rather than
practically.
I write all this to bring prominence/attention to the power of our talking, to the activity of it, to the
movement of it, and to leave in the background the static forms of the already said, the supposed hidden
entities — ‘standing (in)’ for what we call our ‘ideas’, ‘thoughts’, ‘theories’, etc., etc. — that we claim are
really shaping our actions. As I see it (along with Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, etc., etc.) the
meaning of our speakings is ‘in’ their speaking, not in the ‘content’ of what is said. And this is where we
meet all the trouble of academic ways of working. Each discipline has a subject matter — the what our
inquiries. “How shall we define it?” — we say; “How can we conceptualize it?” — we also say. And this is
1
Indeed, one of the best accounts of how such anticipations work within us know to me, is William James’
(1890) account in his famous Stream of Thought chapter: “The truth is,” he says, “that large tracts of human speech
are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense,
though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever... These bare images of logical movement... are
psychic transitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead
from one set of images to another... [These] 'tendencies' are not only descriptions from without, but that they are
among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large
measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all” (vol.1, pp.252254).
how we take it out of the everyday lives of ordinary people; this is how we disconnect it from the lives in
which it has its proper home; this is how we create a fantasy world, which for us as academics, is more
‘real’ than the everyday world of ordinary people.
Concepts, definitions:
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they work ‘from outside’ a circumstance of concern’
they are ‘pre-emptive’ in the sense of decreeing ahead of one’s inquiries, the basic entities one is
going to discover2.
they also work to put a boundary around of field of study
they work only in terms of samenesses, ‘identities’ even
we see the world only through them, as corresponding to definitions of our own devising
their power is supposed to be in their general nature, true for all time, and all places.
in other words, they work in an ‘after-the-fact’ manner to decree the whatness (ontology) of what
we have already observed as having happened in a situation or circumstance.
they are ‘in our interest’ of explaining events in terms of their causes.
ordinary people experience themselves as lacking the ‘expert’ knowledge of academics, but at the
same time experience it as lying outside of what matters to them.
thus academic ‘knowledge’ can all too easily work to disable those who are already enabled (in
many different ways of their own devising).
Is there an alternative? — Yes, the difference making distinctions at work in our speakings
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they work ‘from within’ a circumstance of concern sensed as , ‘from within’ a phenomenon
they work to ‘internally articulate’ it into a more richly structured ‘landscape of possibilities’
they leave the circumstance open to further development
we can thus not define in any precise way the nature of the circumstance — but, noting James’
comment that “we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense” of the “signs of direction in
thought” it provides us with, we can (by the use of images and metaphors, and other carefull
crafted ways of talking, say very precisely what they are like so that others can related to their
nature.
but they do not place any boundaries on the realms of our inquiry — this means that we are
always left with a sense of there being a ‘something more’ that we might bring into out later
inquiries
most importantly, they work, not in terms of identities, but in terms of similarities and
differences3, thus to produce, to repeat the point made above, an internally articulated landscape
of possible ways forward.
this enables inquirers to inquiry into this, that, or some other particular situation in terms of itself,
in terms of features within it of relevance to the concerns of those living within that
circumstance.
they work on listeners by ‘pointing out’ features in the listener’s surroundings to attend to —
features that they themselves may not yet have responded to.
what is most crucial here, though, is both the ethical and political function of our wordings in the
speaking of our utterances.
different words arouse different anticipations of what next might happen.
different intonations indicate a speaker’s own relations to their own words — confident, hesitant,
offered, demanding, etc, etc.
our textual formations matter if we are to inquire into the uniquely particular situations within
which we all live in our everyday lives.
in other words, they can work in a ‘before-the-fact’ manner to ‘point out’ possible steps in a
2
“... the world of the [laboratory] experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality, and
this, while it may increase man's power of making and acting, even of creating a world, far beyond what any previous
age dared to imagine in dream and phantasy, unfortunately puts man back once more – and now even more forcefully
– into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he himself created” (Arendt, 1959, p.261).
3
“Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences
[the making of distinctions]. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the
difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure, 1911/1959, p.120, my
itals).
‘developmental trajectory’ in our exploratory efforts, aimed at determining, along with the others
around us, what collectively we come to call the ‘facts of the matter’.
In other words, our task is to seek to understand what we experience and perceive only in terms of what
we experience and perceive, to understand it in terms of itself, rather than in terms of another, external,
eternal, perfect, hidden world, in fact, of our own creation — to explain what is real for us only by what is
real for us, and the situated and time-bound only by the situated and time-bound. That is, to talk from
within our lives, rather than from an illusory place outside them.