From parole to langue and back

This is kind of interesting... this dude Saussure distinguished between language as it is spoken (parole) and language as a system (langue). The first is embodied, connected, related to place, arising out of relationships between people and environment; the latter is rule-based. the point was that you could analyse langue like it was maths, which you couldn't do with parole.

Then, along comes Merleau-Ponty and says, no, wait a minute, it's all the same, language: it's all contingent and connected and related to the physicality of people and places.

One of the things he said was this: if I see a man whose face is red, who is shaking his fist and shouting, I don't interpret these signals and think, ah, that means that he is angry. Instead I just see anger. Those expressions ARE anger.

And that, of course, is how we understand other animals. When I see a certain display and hear a certain emotion, I know that I am seeing anger or fear or curiosity or attraction. That is what I am seeing.

It is ALL parole.

But that is not the way that the Western philosophical tradition has it. Instead, we move to ever and ever more abstracted concepts. As the ever wonderful David Abram explains, this is related to written language. When we write something down, we remove it from the situation - the ecosystem of being from which it arose - and turn it into something separate.

Prior to the spread of writing, ethical qualities like “virtue,” “justice,” and “temperance” were thoroughly entwined with the specific situations in which those qualities were exhibited. The terms for such qualities were oral utterances called forth by particular social situations; they had no apparent existence independent of those situations. As utterances, they slipped back into the silence immediately after they were spoken; they had no permanent presence to the senses. “Justice” and “temperance” were thus experienced as living occurrences, as events. Arising in specific situations, they were inseparable from the particular persons or actions that momentarily embodied them.

Yet as soon as such utterances were recorded in writing, they acquired an autonomy and a permanence hitherto unknown. Once written down, “virtue” was seen to have an unchanging, visible form independent of the speaker—and independent as well of the corporeal situations and individuals that exhibited it.

Socrates clearly aligned his method with this shift in the perceptual field. Whenever, in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates asks his interlocutor to give an account of what “virtue,” or “justice,” or “courage” actually is, questioning them regarding the real meaning of the qualitative terms they unthinkingly employ in their speaking, they confidently reply by recounting particular instances of the quality under consideration, enumerating specific examples of “justice,” yet never defining “justice” itself.

[...]

In keeping with older, oral modes of discourse, Socrates’ fellow Athenians cannot abstract these spoken qualities from the lived situations that seem to exemplify these terms and call them forth. Socrates, however, has little interest in these multiple embodiments of “virtue,” except in so far as they all partake of some common, unchanging element, which he would like to abstract and ponder on its own. In every case Socrates attempts to induce a reflection upon the quality as it exists in itself, independent of particular circumstances. The specific embodiments of “justice” that we may encounter in the material world are necessarily variable and fleeting; genuine knowledge, claims Socrates, must be of what is eternal and unchanging.

In contrast, I am enthralled by the sensuous. The world of fur and feathers, leaves and shoots, earth and wood and water and air, is, for me, the world. All the rest is just langue.