Filosofía
Gustavo Bueno - Artes divinas y artes humanas
miércoles, 27 de julio de 2016
Gustavo Bueno, "La querella de las artes y las ciencias, IV." (= "Las metamorfosis de la distinción platónica propuesta en el Sofista entre unas artes divinas y unas artes humanas") 23 Nov. 2015. YouTube (fgbuenotv) 25 Nov. 2015.*
2016
Horizon: The Anthropic Principle (1987)
John R. Searle - The Unity of Reality: Why We Live in One World at Most
domingo, 24 de julio de 2016
John R. Searle - The Unity of Reality: Why We Live in One World at Most
Lecture at the University of Bonn, 26 March 2012. ("Prospects for a New Realism").
John Searle (Dpt. of Philosophy, U of California at Berkeley). Online at Uni-Bonn.tv
I transcribe here the following lecture by J. R. Searle:
J.R. Searle:
Thanks a lot for that excellent introduction. I listened carefully. I think people giving an introduction to a conference don’t expect anybody to listen. But I actually listened carefully, and it was a rare philosophical talk becausde as far as I can tell I agree with almost everything he said about philosophy, and it almost never happens to me, so I am very impressed. Also, now I want to thank the organisers for all the work that goes into organising this conference and especially for inviting me, and above all I want to thank everybody for being willing to listen to a lecture in a language that for many of you is not your own first language. I could never do it myself, but I am very glad that other people are willing to listen to a lecture in English, ’cause that’s what you’re going to get from me, being in effect resolutely monolingual. I have lectured in other languages, but generally to the pain of everybody involved.
OK; normally, at a conference like this, the speakers don’t take their theme very seriously, "Prospects for a New Realism"; they talk about whatever they happen to be interested in at the moment, and if it’s got anything to do with the prospects for a new realism, then so much the better, but so much the worse if it doesn’t. I in fact intend to address the actual subject implicit in the title, and I take it from Marcus’s introduction that the sense of realism that we’re talking now is a descendant of the traditional medieval sense, but it’s now... the notion of realism is opposed not so much to nominalism, but to various forms of anti-realism, and in particular the entire idealistic tradition, or pragmatism and instrumentalism.
The basic idea, the basic intuition behind realism, is that there exists a reality that is totally independent of our representations of it. And that has enormous consequences, because, among other consequences, it lends support to the idea of some sort of correspondence conception of truth. If there is a reality out there, then our representations of it are, at least in some respects, answerable to that reality and they will be true or false depending on whether or not they succeed in meeting that requirement.
Now I need to situate the discussion I’m going to give you in present intellectual context, and the central intellectual fact about the present era is that knowledge grows. The increase of knowledge that we’ve had over the past few centuries, but in particular over the past century, is absolutely stunning. I wonder what would be like to take Descartes or Leibniz into a university bookstore and just show them textbooks on molecular biology, or, for that matter, civil engineering. There is a stunning increase in knowledge and that places our philosophical investigation in a somewhat different situation from the tradition. For three hundred years the dominant question in philosophy was epistemic, as Locke put it: the nature and extent of human knowledge, and as Descartes put it more pressingly, how can we answer the skeptic. Now, I think that in a way that in the seventeenth century it was possible to take skepticism seriously as a real threat, I think that we can no longer, we no longer take it seriously as a real threat. There are interesting philosophical puzzles, about how we know we’re not brains in vats or deceived by evil demons, but I think, to put it very bluntly, you can’t send men to the Moon and back and then wonder "does reality really exist out there, is there anything independent"—you can’t send men to the Moon and back and wonder if it’s really possible to make secure predictions about the future based on inductive reasoning.
So, it isn’t that we have resolved the questions of traditional epistemology, but they are no longer gripping to us in the way that they were. Well, what has replaced the epistemic skeptical problem, then, as the central problem in philosophy? Well, when I was an undergraduate, that would have had an easy answer. We were all obsessed with language. And for rather complex reasons that I won’t have time to go into, we’ve evolved beyond that; we no longer have quite the obsession with language, but we have a kind of sensitivity to the philosophical nuances and the threats posed by language that not all of our forebears had.
What has replaced the obsession with language as a central question? Well, a number of questions have replaced it, but the one I want to face is this: given that we have now a remarkable extension of human knowledge, particularly in the form of atomic physics, chemistry, both organic and inorganic, and the natural sciences generally; given this remarkable extension of knowledge, there is a quite pressing philosophical problem, and I want to say it’s the central problem of philosophy today. Well, where is the central problem of intellectual life today? It’s a problem that’s so vast we in effect unconsciously try to prevent our students from understanding that we really don’t know how to answer the problem or even how to pose it, but here is a crude way to pose it. The knowledge that I described tells us that reality is ultimately a matter of entities that we call physical particles. They are not really particles, but that’s a useful shorthand. That the world is made of the entities described by atomic physics and in some sense all of reality has to be a matter of aspects of the basic facts, the basic facts of physics and chemistry.
But now we’ve got a problem, because there is a tension; there is a tension between the basic facts of physics and chemistry and our self-conception. The facts of physics and chemistry tell us that these particles—that the universe is made entirely of mindless tiny physical particles, and yet we think of ourselves as conscious, as having rationality, intentionality, we think of ourselves as moral, as performing speech acts, as having free will, as capable of aesthetic creation and artistic judgement. Now we can pose the central question in a more pressing vein, and that is, how do we reconcile our self-conception as mindful, conscious, free, rational, social, langauge-speaking agents, how do we reconcile that picture with a picture of reality as consisting entirely of mindless, meaningless physical particles? Now, that I think is the problem posed for the new realism; and I want to say, a constraint in addressing that problem, is not just realism, but naturalism: the idea that we are discussing natural phenomena, phenomena that are a part of the real world. On the conception that I am putting forward, if there were such a thing as the supernatural, it would be part of nature like anything else. If God really existed, that would be a fact of physics like anything else; there couln’t be a supernatural, because if there were, it would be part of nature like anything else.
OK, but if that is our question, how to give an account of reality that shows not just how our self-conception is consistent with not only what we know about the world from physics and chemistry, but in some sense is a natural development from; it isn’t just that we’ve got to show that our social reality is possible given a world of basic facts but rather that it is a natural extension of the world of basic facts. We’ve got to show how you can get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents, and we know that you have to do that because it happens; that is, for example, if you’re going to have an election, you’d better have enough electrons; nobody brings the electrons, you can’t have an election—to put it very crudely.
OK, now again, you might say, well, let’s just get busy, and solve the problem that I have posed. And that’s what I’m going to start doing, in a very cursory fashion. But I have to say there are certain enormous intellectual obstacles that we face and for the most part these obstacles derive from our remarkable philosophical tradition, and I have to mention a few of those before I make my positive suggestions.
Well, the first obstacle we face is that somehow or other there’s something especially problematic about the mental. The mind cannot be part of the physical world. You all know the name of that view; traditionally, it’s dualism, but I want to say, the traditional opposition to dualism—monism, materialism, behaviorism—they inherit the worst mistaken dualism, the idea that somehow or other there’s something problematic about the mental, naively construed. One of the worst expressions of this confusion is in something called artificial intelligence, or what I call strong artificial intelligence. I think you can’t understand the project of strong AI unless you see that they don’t think of the mind as part of the natural world like digestion; as one of them, Dan Dennett, said, "the mind is something formal and abstract"—well, you can’t get more Cartesian than that. There’s nothing formal or abstract about digestion, or photosynthesis, or the secretion of bile, and that’s how we are to think of the mental. So that’s one of our curses: it’s the curse, to put it crudely, of God, the soul, and immortality. If you start off with your conception of mind as deriving from a conception of God, the soul, and immortality, then you will never get a naturalistic account of the mental, of the sort that I am advocating.
Now, I used to think that was our main obstacle—the refusal to see the mind as a natural part of the world. But there are a couple of other sources of mistakes. And just as we live under the shadow of God, the soul, and immortality, so we live in the shadow of a certain conception of science. And people mistakenly suppose that science is the name of a set of propositions, of a set of tentative...—what are in fact the actual tentative results of scientific investigation at any stage of human history. And on that conception that they have of science it is as they sometimes like to say, thoroughly materialistic and reductionist. So, on this conception of science, there would be no place for the mental, naively construed, for consciousness and intentionality as I construe them. And indeed if you look at most contemporary philosophers, when they engage in something they like to call "naturalizing consciousness", or "naturalizing intentionality", it almost always means denying the existence of consciousness and intentionality and showing that they are really something else. As Jerry Fodor once put it, "if intentionality really exists, it must be something else". And the answer to that is "it does really exist, and it’s not something else", for reasons that I’m going to try to tell you in a few moments.
So we’ve got these twin curses of God, the soul and immortality on the one hand, and a misconception of science as, so to speak, alternative dogma on the other hand, and we’ve got to crawl out—I’m going to mix this metaphor here slightly—we’ve got to crawl out from under these two heavy burdens that we’ve been carrying. And in the account that I’m going to give you we have to resist any form of postulating that there are alternative realities. The dualism was one horrendous mistake that we’ve still not fully escaped, but it came out in even worse form in the views of, well, for example, Popper and Habermas, that know there are really three worlds out there, there’s the world of the physical, the world of the mental, and then there’s the world, as one author put it, of the social, of the cultural, in all of its manifestations. And I want to say, echoing my title here, no, as my colleague Donald Davidson liked to put it, we live in one world at most, and that’s the world that we need to describe. Well, OK, then, let’s just get busy and do it.
Well, I said we had this... —we live under the course of God, the soul and immortality, but also we live under the influence of a certain conception of perception. Perception, along with action, is a basic way of relating to the world, so you can’t get going in philosophy if you have a false theory of perception. And it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that philosophy over the past three centuries has suffered from a mistaken theory of perception. And the people who make the mistake, well, the names are rather familiar: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant... I could keep going and certainly mail on Hegel, right up to positivism. What’s the mistake? This is a philosophers’ jam, because it’s a simple fallacy and it’s repeated over and over in the history of the subject; I wish I had a blackboard, but anyway, imagine I did, here’s what I would write down. There’s a famous argument, and here’s how it goes. Whatever it is I am now seeing, let’s suppose I now say I now see my watch, well, I could be having a hallucination that was indiscriminable from this case. And fill in your favourite hallucinatory story, we could be deceived by an evil demon, or we’re brains in vats—whatever. The point is I could have exactly this experience and it ’d still be hallucination. But now, in the hallucinatory case, I’m aware of something. I mean, there’s something in my awareness: I’m surely aware of something, it isn’t just impy, my experience. But since the two experiences are indiscriminable, they are qualitatively identical —that’s by hypothesis— then, whatever I’m aware of in the veridical case, it must be exactly the same as what I’m aware of in the hallucination case, because the two cases are indiscriminable. But in the hallucination case I’m not aware of anything in the real world, I’m aware of an idea, an impression or sense data, or whatever term you want to use to describe it. Therefore, it turns out, we’re never directly aware of the real world in perception, we’re always aware only of our own experiences. And we’re then often running with traditional epistemology and I have now... —I’ve been going through a lot of these old arguments, and they all make the following fallacy: In the example I gave you, we’re aware of something in the veridical case, and aware of something in the hallucinatory case; but it must be the same thing in the two cases. There’s a fallacy of ambiguity over the expression "aware of". The sense in which I am aware of my watch when I see it is an intentionalistic sense; the watch is the object of my awareness. The sense in which I am aware of something in the hallucinatory case is not an intentionalistic sense, because the awareness and the object of the awareness are identical; the awareness in the case of the hallucination just is an awareness of the experience. "Awareness of" then just picks an internal accusative, where in awareness the thing you are aware of is the awareness itself. You can see this with a very simple example: push your hand against the table; you are aware of the table, you are also aware of a painful sensation in your hand, if you push hard enough, so it looks like what? That you are really... —that you are aware only of the painful sensation in your hand, or you’re aware really of two things? There’s a fallacy and ambiguity in "aware of". "Aware of" has two senses. In the intentionalistic sense, the thing you are aware of is not identical with the awareness. In the constitutive or identity sense, the thing that you are aware of is the awareness itself, it’s the sensation itself when you push your hand against the table. Now it might seem odd that so much philosophy should be based on such a simple fallacy, but I’ve been through a lot of these guys and I find the fallacy over and over and over and in fact it’s repeated in modern science: "aware", the temptation is to think "well, all we are really aware of when we see anything is what actually happens in the cortex, when the neuron firings finally produce a visual experience" So, roughly speaking, from Descartes to Francis Crick, we find the same fallacy repeated over and over. And it is a beauty for philosophers, because it is a clear and identifiable fallacy, that rare thing, it’s a fallacy of ambiguity in the occurrence of the expression "aware of"; the fallacy is repeated in all —at least all that I’ve been able to find—all of the traditional arguments. Hume thought a realistic theory of perception was so stupid that he only bothered to refute it in one sentence. He said, if you are tempted to realism, to naive or direct realism, push your eyeball. The world would double if naive realism were true, so it’s not true. That’s the fallacy I’ve been talking about. The world doesn’t "double" when I push my eyeball. What actually happens is that I then have two visual experiences where I used to have one visual experience before.
Anyhow, I’m tempted to give you the whole lecture about this fallacy, because it’s everywhere you turn around. There’s a mistaken theory of perception called "disjunctivism"—I hope it hasn’t spread to Bonn, because it’s all over the streets of Berkeley; but it commits the same fallacy. The idea is that if you think that you can actually... that there’s something in common between the hallucination and the veridical case, then what is in common has to be the object perceived. So it turns the traditional argument on its head; the traditional argument says, well, all you do perceive are the contents of your mind. And the disjunctivist says, well, if you don’t accept disjunctivism, you would have to accept that all that you perceive are the contents of your mind. Both make the same mistake.
OK, I want to assume we’ve overcome those mistakes, that we have naive realism —some kind of direct realism as our theory of perception, and we are out from under the burden of God, the Soul and Immortality, and a certain conception of science... —where do we go? Well, actually I think many —not all, but many— of the philosophical problems have relatively easy and fairly natural, if not solutions, at least approaches to the problem, that would give us a correct conception of the relations. So le’ts just go through several of these problems.
Well, I’d start with the famous mind/body problem. How can it be the case, —I said the world consisted entirely of physical particles... —by the way, I’m embarrassed to say they’re not really particles, and there is a more acute embarrassment I should mention at least in passing. The latest version of physics that I get in Berkeley is that our old friends the atoms and the molecules, and I loved physics when there were electrons, protons, and neutrons, but now God knows, with all the quarks and muons and so on, it’s less fun. But that’s just, you know, that’s what we pay all those guys to do. But it turns out that that cheerful friendly world, that’s only about four per cent of reality. And what’s the rest? Well, the other 96% is dark energy and dark matter. Oh, yeah? And what’s dark about them? What’s dark about them is we don’t know what the hell is going on in there. The darkness is a matter of our cognitive state, not a feature of the physics we are describing. But anyway, I’m going to assume that whatever is going on there is the same as goes on in physics as traditionally conceived. OK, well, if that’s right, then how do we situate consciousness and intentionality within this picture? And I think once you accept a completely naturalistic view, and you accept the realistic conception of the mental, of consciousness and intentionality, then it’s not all that hard.
Try to imagine what it would be like if we had no philosophical tradition. If we had the kind of knowledge of how the world works that we have anyway, but we had no great tradition on the one hand of God, the Soul and Immortality, and no great tradition on the other hand of supposing that science has to be reductionist and materialistic. Then it seems to me that there’s a fairly obvious solution to the philosophical parts of the so-called mind/body problem, and that is, mental states, there are the two great features of mental states, consciousness and intentionality—they are real: they are real, natural phenomena. They are as real as any other biological phenomena, and they are entirely caused by neurobiological processes. We don’t know the details, but we’re making a lot of progress. We now know a whole lot more about the brain than we did when I first got interested in these, just the sheer volume of knowledge that we have. When I first got interested in the brain, there were about five known neurotransmitters. Now there are over fifty, and still counting. So we know now a lot more about the brain, but whatever we know, we know that all our conscious states and all of our intentional processes are caused by neurobiological processes.
But that doesn’t solve our ontological problem. Where are they? What’s going on? And there I want to say the answer to that is equally simple. They are realized in the brain as higher-level features. Just as the liquidity of this glass of water is not something squirted out by the H2O molecules, but rather is a state that the molecules are in, it’s causally explained by the behavior of the molecules, so the consciousness present in my brain right now is not an extra juice squirted out by the neurons, but is a state that the brain is in, and it’s causally explained by the behavior of the neurons.
Philosophers like labels. I was once asked, "What’s the name of your view?" Oh my God, I didn’t have a name, so I thought of one on the spot; I said, "It’s Biological Naturalism". Well, OK. I’m sort of stuck with that. But anyway, that’s the view that I’m putting forward.
Now grant me, then, that we do have a reality of the mental, and that it’s part of nature, it’s part of biology, there’s nothing in it that’s reminiscent of the dualistic tradition that postulates somehow or other that Geist cannot be part of the ordinary physical world. Grant me that: then, it’s not all that hard to see how if you’ve got creatures that have intentionality, that have this capacity for beliefs and desires and hopes and fears and intentions and perceptions, they have all these capacities —then it seems to me it’s not hard to see how they can get collective intentionality; how you can have shared intentions, and even shared beliefs, and shared desires; where you are engaged in an activity, not just "I am doing this", but "I am doing this as part of our doing this", you have collective intentionality". Now, once you have intentionality and collective intentionality, you are often running with the possibility of a much richer ontology than you would have without that.
However, lots of animals have both of those features; they have intentionality and consciousness on the one hand, and they have a capacity to share that on the other. What’s special about human beings?
Well, one of the things that’s special is that human beings have language. So the next great task that we have to account for in philosophy is how do you get from this raw, pre-linguistic mental life, to the richness of natural human languages. And here I’m going to be rather brief, but I would want to tell you the broad outlines. The key to understand intentionality is that intentional states have conditions under which they are satisfied or not satisfied—what I call conditions of satisfaction. What stands to the beliefs being true is what stands to the desires being satisfied is what it stands to the intentions being carried out. Think of intentionality as the representation of the conditions of satisfaction. I think that perceptual intentionality is a special kind of case where you’ve got a direct presentation of the conditions of satisfaction, it’s not a matter of shuffling representations.
Well, if that’s right, then if you ask yourself, well, how do you get linguistic meaning in a world that has a rich neurobiology along with the structures of intentionality including collective intentionality? Then I think the answer is fairly simple, at least in its broad outline, and it’s this. If you ask yourself, what’s the difference between saying something and meaning it, and saying it without meaning it, I think there’s a simple answer to that. Wittgenstein, by the way, used to ask questions like that because he wanted us to get out of the idea that meaning was the name of an introspective process. But there is a difference between saying something and meaning it, and saying it without meaning it.
Suppose I say es regnet as the matter of practising German pronunciation. I say it, but I don’t mean it: I’m practising it in the shower, we’ll say. But now if I actually go outdoors and say es regnet, and I really mean it, then there’s a difference. What’s the difference? The utterance with a meaning has conditions of satisfaction which just practising the pronunciation does not have. The condition of satisfaction of saying es regnet without meaning it is just that I correctly pronounce the German words. But if I say it and mean it, then the correct... the utterance with a correct pronunciation of the words now has additional conditions of satisfaction—namely, it should be raining. I know... —I think this is, in its simple form, as a key to understanding meaning, speaker meaning, a fundamental form of meaning, is the intentional imposition of conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction. You make the sounds through your mouth, and that’s intentional, so the production of the sounds is itself the condition of satisfaction of your intention to produce them. But the production of the sounds now has conditions of satisfaction on... —built on to those conditions of satisfaction, namely that they should correspond to something in the world, in one or the other... —one of various possible directions of fit. So that gives us the first step in the analysis of language. Now you’ve got to be able to communicate those meanings to other people. And the next crucial element we need is the notion of convention. The notion of convention is the notion of a procedure that you can follow: you make the noises that other people in your tribe have a right to expect will only be uttered under certain conditions, that is, only under conditions... —when the conditions of satisfaction are in fact satisfied; they have a right to expect that you will be speaking truly.
So you get meaning and convention. And that enables you to communicate meanings, because the conventions are shared.
Now the next thing you need in your account of language —and this is a stunning development, it changes everything— and that is internal structure. The marvelous thing about human language is, you see, there are all sorts of other signaling systems among animals; the bees are probably the best understood—they have nothing like the internal structure of... —the syntax of natural languages. You have a structure when you can make the distinction between the reference of the noun phrase and the condition specified by the verb phrase.
My dog, Tarski, is a very intelligent dog. He’s a Burmese mountain dog; I mean, he looks like a sincere dog and he is very intelligent. And he can believe that someone is at the door. But he can’t believe "Well, maybe there are seventeen people at the door", or "Wouldn’t it be nice if people came to the door next week?" or "By the way, have you done your income tax on time this year?" He can’t think any of those thoughts, and not because he’s too stupid—he’s actually pretty intelligent. But he doesn’t have the internal syntactical resources for those sorts of thoughts. So syntax, literally, gives us the capacity for an infinite number of thoughts, for an infinite number of thoughts in a way that animals lacking inner syntax do not have that capacity. The dog can think "There’s somebody at the door" but he cannot think "I wish there were some more people at the door" or "I hope we get more people coming to the door next week". To have those thoughts, you’ve got to have a richer syntax than he has.
OK, so now we’ve got... –and I apologize for the brevity, but I have only a very short space of time— we’ve got these biological beasts, namely ourselves, we’re running around—and presumably when we’re getting this stuff in its primitive form we’re running around in northern Europe, perhaps not far from here—and we’ve got consciousness and intentionality which we share with lower animals, but also we’ve got meaning, convention and syntax, and that gives us an enormous power. Now, the power is not just the power to communicate, to communicate complex thoughts, but it gives us the power to create a kind of reality that other animals do not have, and I want now to say something about that.
Typically, speech acts represent reality in oner or the other of the most famous directions of fit: the aim of statements, like perception, is to represent how things are, what I call the mind-to-world direction of fit; the contents of the mind are supposed to fit reality, and to the extent that they do we say they are true or false. The test for the mind-to-world direction of fit, the simplest test, is can you say literally that it’s true or false? The upward direction of fit, which you get with commissives and directives, with promises, vows, threats and pledges on the one hand, and orders, commands and requests on the other, the aim there is not to represent how things are, but to change reality by getting reality to match the content of the speech act, to match the content of the representation. They have the world-to-word direction of fit.
But no here’s an amazing fact, and I don’t know any communication system other than the human that has this, and that is that we have a capacity to create a reality by representing that reality as existing. The most famous examples of this were in Austin’s discussion of performatives, where you can make something the case by saying that it’s the case. The chairman can adjourn the meeting by saying "The meeting is adjourned"; war can be declared by the appropriate authorities saying "War is declared". And you can even perform other speech acts by declaring yourself to be performing them: you can make a promise by saying "I promise". These speech acts have both directions of fit. They make something the case by representing it as being the case. They make it the case, and thus achieve the upward or world-to-mind direction of fit, but they change reality, they bring about that change, by representing reality as having been so changed. They make it the case that war is on, that you are husband and wife, that you have received a piece of property, that Barack Obama is the President of the United States, that I’m a professor of the University of California, Berkeley... All those facts are created by speech acts that have this form. And I have a name for those: I call them declarations.
Human institutional civilization is created entirely by a certain class of declarations, where you make something the case by representing it as being the case.
But now, how can you do so much with such a feeble apparatus? What sort of fact do we create? And here we get an interesting hybrid between realism and constructivism. It’s really the case that I’m a professor, and that these bits of paper in my wallet are euros I use as currency in the European... in the signers of the European Community; those really are epistemically objective facts, but they are only facts by human agreement. It’s a fifty-euro note not because of some feature of physics, but because we have accepted that it is, and that acceptation, that fact is created by a declaration, and it’s maintained in its continued existence by representations that have the form of a declaration. How can such a thing be? Well, here I have to introduce a crucial notion: the notion of a status-function.
Humans have a capacity to impose functions on objects. So, this object, my watch, has a function, and this glass carrying water has another, and this, my wallet, has a function... Lots of animals also have that capacity to impose functions on objects. But humans have a remarkable capacity and as far as I know it’s not shared by any other species. And that is there are class of functions where the function is performed not in virtue of the physical structure of the entity in question (you see, these entities perform their function in virtue of their physical structure)—the function is performed not in virtue of the physical structure but in virtue of the fact that through collective intentionality we have assigned a status to the person or the object: the status of being money, or the status of being President of the United States, or the status of being the University of Bonn. And with that status goes a function or set of functions which can only be performed in virtue of the collective acceptance of the object or person’s having that status and with that acceptance the acceptance of the functions that go along with that.
So the remarkable thing about human civilization, and I want to keep reminding this is intended as completely realistic in the sense that I described and it’s completely objective epistemically, it isn’t my opinion—this is money, really is money—but it’s a natural consequence of our biological structure, given language: we create a reality, and this is the reality of human civilization. We create a property of money, government, property, marriage, universities, cocktail parties, income tax, and philosophical conferences. All of those are created by repeated applications of representations that have the logical form that I described, and I call them status-function declarations.
Now, not all declarations are status-function declarations. When God, if he had existed, said "Let there be light", that was a declaration: he’s not saying, "Someone over there, turn on the lights", it’s not a directive, it’s not a promise, he’s not saying "I’ll make light for you guys when I get around to it", he’s making it the case that there’s light, by representing it as being the case. Now we can’t do that, we can’t create light just by declaring light to exist, but we can create governments, money, property, marriages, universities, and all the rest of that, phenomena that are peculiar to human civilization. We do those by representations that have this logical structure, where you make something the case by representing it as being the case.
Now, what’s the point of doing that? I mean, ist’t all a kind of massive fantasy? And the answer is, it creates power. Throughout your life, you are immersed in a sea of status-functions. You are a professor or a student; you are a husband or a wife; you are a citizen of Germany, and the owner of a car, and the possessor of a driver’s license. All of those are status-functions: we create these power relations. But what kind of power is that, where status functions can create power? And the power has various names, in English. In English, they are obligations, rights, duties, responsibilities, authorizations, etc.; that is, there is a list of the kind of powers that you can create using this apparatus that I have described. Now, the interesting thing is this, if you say, well, all right, you’ve created these power relations, but how does it work? I mean, how does it give any grip on rationality, how does it motivate behavior?
And the answer is, then, going the next step, human civilization has a remarkable feature, that other forms of animal life do not have. And that is, we create a set of power relations that give people reasons for acting that are independent of their immediate inclinations, they are what I call desire-independent reasons for acting—and that is what status-functions do. If you accept that you have an obligation, or that somebody else has a right, then you accept that you have a reason for doing something that’s independent of your immediate inclination. And this is what gives human institutional reality its enormous power. A nice person invites me to give a talk in Bonn, and it seems like a good idea so I say yes. But then that day arrives, and I’ve got to get up at four in the morning and make my way to San Francisco airport, and do all the sort of things that one has to do nowadays—in the United States you have even got to take you damn shoes off, I won’t go through the sordidnes... well, you’re all familiar with the sordidness of air travel. And I don’t think, "oh boy, how much fun, to sit in an airplane for endless hours and eat airplane food, and trying to put my elbow where some other guy is trying to put his elbow and all the other things... but I do it! I do it, why? Well, I made a promise. I made a promise to do it and that gave me a reason for doing it, and now I’m glad i did it!
However, and let me just conclude. What I urge is this: If we can just get out from under our horrendously bad tradition; if we can get out from under the mistake that I’ve described as the foundational mistake of modern epistemology, and if we can get out from under the mistakes which go with that, the twin mistakes of religion and science—both, I think, misconceived; —and those mistakes are not trivial mistakes, I mean, there are names to repeat: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, not to mention Mill and Hegel and others I’ve know better, I mean, you would have to throw in Schopenhauer, I’m sure; and if we can get out from under those mistakes, then there’s a possibility of doing a type of philosophy which I think is much more productive than ocurred in the past. I’ve only mentioned three features of this type of philosophy: they are mind, language, and society. They are rather important features but I think the approach that I’m advocating would also be the right approach to take to ethics, aye, and aesthetics, aye, and political philosophy and lots of other branches of philosophy.
So the general message that I want to leave you with is, as I said, we say we live in one world, and one of the most... the most single, most fascinating question of philosophy today is how we can give an account of ourselves as rational agents in that one physical-so-called world.
Thank you very much.
—oOo—
Complexity and Emergence
J. Hillis Miller, SPEECH ACTS IN LITERATURE
J. Hillis Miller, SPEECH ACTS IN LITERATURE
Publicado en Semiótica. com. José Ángel García Landa
J. Hillis Miller, Actos de habla en la literatura
Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford UP, 2001). "El lenguaje actúa en la literatura" (y vice versa, claro). Un libro de crítica literaria y lingüística precioso, y que puede marcarte si decides escuchar lo que dice, hasta límites que no los pone el libro, sino tú mismo.
Introduction: How to "Bog, by Logical Stages, Down"
Como J. L. Austin, que con sus actos de habla inventó los actos de habla. Todos somos diferentes tras el acto de habla. "The one who promises is made different by uttering the words" (2). A Austin lo que le embarra el argumento es la citacionalidad y sus ambivalencias: "Citation, or repetition, seems both necessary to a felicitous speech act and at the same time capable of vitiating it" (3). (Por otra parte, Austin nunca es fiel a su propósito de tratar "the total speech-act in the total speech-situation" [cit por Miller, 4]—a no ser que su manera de ser fiel es dejar su argumento inconcluso). Pero ¿por qué habla Hillis Miller, "some low type" quizá, no lingüista ni filósofo, sobre actos de habla? ¿No se mete en el "corralito" de otros? (Yo se lo pregunté, y me dijo, más abiertamente que en el libro, que en efecto pretendía su libro ser de relevancia para la lingüística y oponerse a algunas tesis sobre la teoría de los actos de habla comúnmnente aceptadas en lingüística). Aquí dice que "the idea that philosophy can be read rightly only by a secret guild of philosophers is an absurd or even pernicious idea, destructive of philosophy's proper social role" (5). Bajo toda enseñanza auténtica late la incertidumbre de que no sea una enseñanza autoritativa, autorizada, o autorizable.
Capítulo 1: J. L. Austin
How to Do Things with Words: el título es una descripción y una promesa. "Austin's title for How to Do Things with Words is the first joke among many jokes in this admirable joke book" (11). (¿O es un libro de autoayuda?). Todo escrito se presta a enfrentarse con nosotros y plantearnos la disyuntiva de reconocerlo, hacernos responsables de él, o desentendernos de él. Austin no publicó su libro en vida, no se hizo tan responsable de lo que dijo. ¿Es un argumento fallido, una catástrofe intelectual? Bueno, "The insights are attained through the process of bogging down" (12). Cosa que no creen hacer sus seguidores, pero "If such speech-act theorists had been slightly more careful readers of Austin, they would have seen that he had already conclusively demonstrated the impossibility of establishing a clear and complete doctrine of speech acts" (13). (Bueno, pues menudas perspectivas para la argumentación del propio Miller, ¿no?). El libro de Austin rompe con la tradición filosófica de fe en la claridad conceptual. Los actos de habla están interpenetrados indisolublemente. "This crossbreeding or cross-contamination is perhaps the chief and most valuable discovery of How to Do Things with Words, though it clearly does not help to fulfill the promise made in the second lecture to distinguish clearly between constative and performative. Austin's genius as a philosopher is to allow his intelligence to be led, 'by logical stages', to conclusions that he does not, at least apparently, want to reach. The other, related, mark of his genius is his ability to adduce examples that cause the most trouble for the general doctrine he is trying to prove" (15).
Austin es un filósofo poético, y Miller lo leerá como a un literato, atento a la estructura retórica y narrativa, o a los ejemplos y chistes, del libro — como parte inseparable de su argumentación. Argumento y texto, que para un desconstructor no pueden ignorarse uno a otro. Leer a Austin como literato es la manera de enfrentarse a la teoría de los actos de habla allá donde la lingüística o la pragmática no llegarán. Y es hacer lingüística, a la vez que es hacer literatura... o ética, y hasta religión también, en el caso de este libro de Miller.
Se recordará que Austin excluía de su estudio de los actos de habla "casos especiales" o "parasitarios" como la literatura, chistes, ficciones, etc. Pero "Austin is like a man who has exorcised a ghost only to find that it keeps coming back. Literature is the ghost that haunts How to Do Things With Words" (18). Hasta cierto sentido lo sabe, de ahí su teatralidad irónica: "Austin has a habit of commenting on what he is doing, to some degree from the outside, as though he were two persons, the one doing it and the other watching the first doing it. These comments are often wryly ironic, modest, or comic" (19).
"How to Do Things with Words is explicitly intended to be constative through and through" (21). Peeero... también dice Austin que sus lecciones son "verdaderas, al menos en parte" (!). ¿Cuál será la otra parte? "It looks like a given piece of language must be one of the four: true, false, performative, or nonsense. Y el libro, o el capítulo "Performative utterances", "has a pervasive, explicit, and nevertheless problematic performative dimension" (22). El libro entero es un enunciado performativo de algún tipo, "somewhat disheveled" (23). De este tipo en concreto: "an act of foundation" (23), el documento inaugural de la teoría de los actos de habla. Austin se presenta a sí mismo haciendo algo que nadie ha hecho antes, una especie de revolucionario: "A revolution is a performative act of a particular, 'nonstandard' kind, namely the anomalous kind that creates the circumstances or conventions that validate it, while masking as a constative statement. A revolution is groundless, or rather, by a metaleptic future anterior, it creates the grounds that justify it" (27). (Ver más sobre este tema en mi comentario a la Declaración de Independencia de los Estados Unidos. Allí también comento que esta noción de los actos inaugurales de Hillis Miller (y Derrida) tiene interesantes consecuencias para la teoría narrativa, y en concreto para el concepto de retrospección y retroacción).
Y así, como otras revoluciones, How to Do Things with Words es un acontecimiento filosóficamente revolucionario que adopta el disfraz de una mera constatación de los hechos — "Austin pulled off a successful revolution, albeit, as is usual with revolutions, with a considerable betrayal of the principles on which the revolution was founded" (28).
Austin vuelve como un culpable a la cuestión de la literatura, una y otra vez. Por ejemplo, en su tratamiento también problemático de la intencionalidad. "On the one hand, the performative depends on the intentions or sincerity of the one who speaks. (. . . ). On the other hand, the performative must not depend on the intentions or sincerity of the one who speaks. If Austin's theory is to be cogent, and if he is to attain his goeal of securing law and order, the words themselves must do the work, not the secret intentions" (28-29). Esto parece contradecirse con la idea cristiana de que la autenticidad reside en un lugar visible sólo a Dios, la interioridad. Austin desautoriza esta idea de la interioridad, pero de modo ambivalente; a la vez quiere que nuestra palabra nos ate, en aras del orden público y la responsabilidad social; por otra, no, porque eso "would put Austin where he does not want to be, that is, with de Man, who sees language, especially performatives, as something that operates mechanically, regardless of what the speaker thinks, feels, or intends, usually against his intentions" (32). Austin se resiste a ver que lo lleva allí el libro que está creando: "Rather it should be called How Words Do Things to You, or How to Be Done In By Words, in recognition of the autonomous power of language to do unforeseen things, 'independently of any intent or any drive or any ddesire that we might have' [de Man]. Among those thins is the generation, as an illusion or specter, of the autonomous self, the ego or "I" that Austin presupposes and takes for granted as the necessary foundation of felicitous speech acts" (32).
(El ego múltiple, y la forma en que el lenguaje le da forma. Hay un poema de E. E. Cummings sobre este asunto...).
Los soliloquios no valen para Austin como ejemplos de actos de habla. (¿Es la literatura un soliloquio? Para Miller, un acto de habla público requiere un receptor, y también un tercero, un testigo. En los escritos públicos presumiblemente los segundos hacen de terceros también). Hillis Miller ya criticó en "The Critic as Host" la idea de que la literatura es parasitaria del lenguaje, o de que la crítica es parasitaria de la literatura. (Una noción ésta que tiene bastante que ver con la crítica asumiendo responsabilidad por su propio discurso, volviéndose crítica crítica,crítica creativa). El teatro de Austin dictando performativamente lo que excluye de su teoría tiene a Miller frotándose las manos: "What a melange of mixed, "poetic" metaphors Austin uses: hollow, void, sea-change, parasitic, etiolations! Each invites in commentary" (36).
"The question is whether the parasite may not belong in the home, or come to be at home there, that is, whether literature may not after all be an essential part of the economy of speech acts. [Pero que le vayan a contar esto a los del corralito disciplinario de la "lingüística"... ]. If How to Do Things With Words is taken as an example, that is certainly the case, since the parasitic, in the form of jokes, irony, hidden citations, dramatic examples, obscure dialogues, and so on, is essential to the working of the performative revolution Austin is trying to effect. Nevertheless, these features may at the same time undercut his project, undermine it, make it in a peculiar way hollow or void" (37).
Austin introduce la noción cuasi-nietzscheana de fuerza ilocucionaria, otra invención performativa. Y las "condiciones de felicidad" para que la Fuerza funcione... pero sus ejemplos y marginalizaciones paradójicas lo pierden.
"One way to define Austin's problems is to say that he remains in his analyses at the level of grammar and logic without ever going on explicitly to the tropological or rhetorical levels. He uses tropes brilliantly and commands a powerful rhetoric, but he does not generally reflect on the implications of the way his use of tropes is necessary to get said what he wants to say" (39). (Reconocemos aquí el motivo central de una fábula clásica o cuento popular... ¿cuál es?). Su libro es una obra literaria que se ignora a sí misma como tal. "Nevertheless, if de Man is right, it may be the irony of How to Do Things with Words that makes it performatively effective" (42). Los ejemplos no son inocentes nunca: "Of philosophers and theorists in general it can be said, 'By their examples ye shall know them'" (43). De Platón a Austin, los mejores filósofos eligen ejemplos que someten a presión las doctrinas que están propugnando (— Y para analizar esta relación entre la filosofía y su texto, y llegar a una filosofía superior o diferente, está la desconstrucción). Los ejemplos de Searle son de baja presión, los de Austin no. En su teoría de los ejemplos efectúa Hillis Miller un razonamiento desconstructivista clásico (con analogías con el pensamiento antiabstraccionista de los integracionalistas), e introduce su tropo favorito, la catacresis que amplía lo pensable:
"Examples are examples of the trope called synecdoche, part for whole. Their efficacy depends on assuming that the whole is homogeneous and that the example chosen is a fair sample of the whole: 'All the other cases are like that'. This is conspicuously not so with Austin's examples, or indeed with examples generally. Each example tends to be sui generis, an incomparable special case that in the end turns out to exemplify only itself, not to be 'typical' at all." (43-44). Los ejemplos son a la vez parecidos y únicos, un problema... como las diferencias entre los actos de habla:
"A major cause of 'bogging down' is his pragmatic or empirical discovery, through the exploration of examples, that each kind of performative utterance differs from all the others" (45). En sus ejemplos, Austin transforma sus performativos al estilo indirecto, como si los narrase en una novela. Su propio discurso está infectado de literatura... Así, sus ejemplos cuentan una historia que contradice al argumento explícito y deliberado del libro. El inconsciente del libro (o de Austin) se revuelve contra la ideología dominante que quiere asentar y expresar, y que se trasluce en sus ejemplos y las jerarquías que suponen en la realidad: el varón occidental es en los ejemplos de Austin el sujeto ideal del acto performativo válido, pero "The hierarchy shades down through women to various animals—monkeys, horses, donkeys, cats—with each lower stage increasingly unable to utter happy performatives" (51). Los primitivos, nos dice Austin, no distinguían claramente entre unos actos de habla y otros (—de hecho Occidente era primitivo entonces hasta que vino Austin con la teoría de los Actos de Habla, y quizá lo sigue siendo si hemos de creer a Miller). Para Miller, Austin "needs to believe in primitive ambiguity in order to have confidence that he is making progress. His actual experience, however, is of bogging down. He finds that his distinctions do not hold, are unapplicable abstractions" (52). Así, Austin ejemplifica la comedia de la lúcida mente occidental tratando con una realidad intratable, y que sabe no puede reducirse a razón. Nunca podemos, por ejemplo, predeterminar qué acto de habla estamos realizando...
"... as Austin abundantly shows, you can never wholly control 'how' a given utterance is going to be taken, by different people for different uses in different circumstances, or just what its force will be" (54).
Austin quiere mantener el orden. La violencia cómica de sus ejemplos sugiere que el Orden es inestable, que el equilibrio social es precario. Y, para mayor alarma, el hecho de que su argumento se empantane sugiere una imposibilidad de justificar o mantener ese orden público. (Por cierto, la expresión "bog down" sugiere los límites del orden humano impuesto con carreteras, o las fronteras de Occidente, donde acaba el Imperio. Uno se empantana en Irlanda, o en Rusia, o donde la civilización pierde su honesto nombre). Austin sueña con asentar el orden público de responsabilidades éticas del lenguaje en "an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances" (cit. por Miller, 57). "The ultimate goal of Austin's work is to secure the conditions whereby law and order may be kept" (57).
"His examples indirectly assert and reinforce a powerful set of presumptions: the ideal of the male at the top in full possession of his "I," speaking from a position of authority in the right circumstances, and then women, animals, poets, 'low types', actors and actresses, soliloquizers who mutter sotto voce, and so on, beneath the men of authority, firmly kept in place. (. . . . ) This vision of history has the white male English philosopher, not surprisingly, as its evolutionary goal. This superior man is ceaselessly at work purifying the dialect of the tribe, making distinctions, therefore making law and its enforcement possible, as was not the case for our primitive ancestors who spoke in one-word sentences that were vague and ambiguous." (58).
"That How to Do Things with Words is the record of a failure to achieve its goal, securing law and order, that it is the record rather of a bogging, by logical stages, down, is the underlying 'serious' drama of the lectures" (59). "In spite of Austin's efforts, How to Do Things with Words is more subversive of law and order than supportive of them" (59).
(Aquí yo matizaría... Me encanta la lectura de Miller, pero mal podemos perder de vista que el libro de Austin es, además de un fracaso, un triunfo, y que sus distinciones son utilizadas. Han sido "seminales" como diríamos por perpetuar el mito del potente varón. Aunque eso sí, nunca escapa su uso a las ambivalencias que señala Miller. Así que el uso que le demos al libro de Austin depende en buena medida de nosotros, algo con lo que creo que Miller sí estaría de acuerdo).
Dos regímenes tecnológicos en colisión detecta Miller en la confrontación (in absentia) de Austin y Derrida. El concepto del ego unitario y perdurable esencial para la teoría de los actos de habla está ligado a la comunicación impresa. Derrida en su crítica invierte las prioridades de Austin: "felicitious speech acts are parasitic on infelicitous ones, on literature in fact, rather than the other way round" (61). Derrida pertenece a la era post-cartesiana de Internet, a un nuevo régimen de telecomunicaciones:
"That regime is a place of spectral, fleeting, impermanent selves created and decreated by media. In those media the distinction between fact and fiction, real and imaginary, no longer firmly holds or no longer holds in the same way as it did in the era of the printed book" (61). Derrida ha reflexionado sobre las condiciones de responsabilidad ética, comunidad y democracia en esta nueva era, y parte de ese trabajo de reflexión es su crítica al acto de habla tal como es concebido por Austin.
(Y sin embargo, añadiría yo, la vieja y la nueva era también están secretamente interpenetradas... Después de todo, bien dice Derrida que la palabra es siempre ya una inscripción).
2. Jacques Derrida
La cuestión de la performatividad en el lenguaje es central en la obra de Derrida, dice Miller; no sólo en sus obras como Limited Inc donde critica a Austin y Searle (y que yo criticaba en los años ochenta desde una perspectiva más bien searleana). También en la obra de Miller: "This role of literary study in the investigation of ethical and political commitment, the role of 'speech acts in literature', is my focus in this book" (64). Ambos investigan el concepto de groundlessness, el carácter inaugural de los actos de habla, su carencia de bases, "the originary performativity that does not conform [qui ne se plie pas ] to preexisting conventions, unlike all the performatives analyzed by the theoreticians of speech acts, but whose force of rupture produces the institution or the constitution, the law itself, which is to say also the meaning [le sens] that appears to, that ought to, or that appears to have [qui paraît, qui devrait, qui paraît devoir] to guarantee it in return" ( Specters of Marx, cit. en Miller 64). (Se verá que esta dimensión retroactiva del acto de habla realizativo o performativo tiene también interesantes implicaciones para la teoría de la narración, la célebre retrospección que tanto me interesa. De hecho, podría decirse que el acto de narrar es uno de estos actos de habla performativos, configurativos de la acción y de la historia que supuestamente se limitan a transmitir. Más sobre estos objetos retrovistos aquí). Derrida, por su parte, habla de la interpretación performativa o realizativa, "performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets [qui transforme cela même qu'elle interprète]" (Specters of Marx , cit. en Miller, 64). Y en sentido aún más amplio podemos hablar de la dimensión performativa de toda representación).
Niega Derrida hablar de la "indeterminación" del sentido: sí enfatiza su indecidibilidad,que es una oscilación determinada entre posibilidades. Va unida a la iterabilidad, que conlleva que nunca podemos estar seguros de estar significando lo que queremos significar o decir. Toda enunciación está contaminada de iterabilidad (no sólo "te amo te, a-mo" que decía Umberto-to). Por ejemplo, si algo es verdad, es eminentemente iterable. No se puede poner un copyright a lo que es cierto. Derrida torea a Searle utilizando el copyright de su artículo contra él mismo. La diferencia entre la cita y la iteración es que la cita supuestamente arrastra su contexto original consigo de modo implícito, mientras que la iteración de un signo puede usarlo en un contexto radicalmente nuevo (Una diferencia no absoluta, supongo). Derrida habla de la iterabilidad de las marcas o trazos. "To say 'mark' rather than 'word' or even 'sign' has important implications, as Derrida indicates. It allows him, for example, to challenge the age-old notion, going back to Aristotle, that man is the only animal with language and therefore radically distinct from the other animals" (79). (Bueno, lo de 'going back to Aristotle'... ). Lo esencial es que cualquier marca puede iterarse, y eso lo usa Derrida para subvertir la lógica austiniana de los actos de habla. "For him, the pure promise is a 'fictional' phantasm derived from the impure one. Why is that? Because what exists 'originally' are speech acts marked, from the beginning or even before the beginning, by iterability, that is, by impurity. The impure is the original" (81). (Me recuerda este debate al reciente artículo de Carl Zimmer contra la pureza de las especies, recordándonos que todos descendemos de híbridos). Este razonamiento derrideano es también el que aplica a la crítica del presente puro; la iterabilidad crea un tipo de temporalidad que interpenetra presente, pasado y futuro. "This temporality makes the present never present because it always reaches toward a apast that never was present and a future that will never be reached as present" (83). Derrida socava así la claridad de todas las distinciones establecidas por Austin. Para Miller, "Austin's speech-act theory and its reductive codification by Searle belong to the age of print"; "Derrida, on the contrary, belongs to the age of the new communications technologies that are bringing the ate of traditional print media to an end" (87).
Adiós al ego: ya no existe su autopresencia cartesiana. Adiós al receptor: la marca es aautónoma, puede funcionar en ausencia radical de cualquier emisor y receptor concreto. (Aunque no en la ausencia de todo receptor, habría que subrayar aquí, there's the rub. ¿Y puede decirse que el propio emisor y receptor no va marcado en su marca—autores implícitos, receptores implícitos, etc.? Conviene aquí evitar respuestas demasiado categóricas y descontextualizadas). La intención, también queda problematizada con la teoría de la marca iterable: "Whatever marks I make are cut off from my intention and left free to have meanings and ever new meanings in all the potentially different contexts in which they may be read" (93). (Ah, pero ninguna libertad es absoluta...). La intención ya está marcada por esta iterabilidad de la marca, está dividida de entrada y orientada a los otros, separada de sí misma.
El inconsciente como matriz. Los sentidos de nuestras marcas no pueden sernos presentes, desbordan al yo. No podemos acceder a nuestro propio sentido.
Contexto insaturable: en términos de teoría de los conjuntos, se refiere a que la teoría de los actos de habla es en sí misma un acto de habla, "debe someterse a la misma normatividad y jerarquía que pretende analizar" según Derrida, y de ahí el empantanamiento de Austin con los discursos marginales y no serios. "Derrida, however, both uses, in positive and productive ways, and says that he uses, these forces of the nonserious , while showing why it is impossible to be serious, thereby turning this loss into a gain" (103). Una marca no puede ordenar y dominar su contexto a la manera del jarrón de Wallace Stevens en un paisaje. "The context is never saturated by the mark's force" (105). (Este asunto debe relacionarse con la dicotomía entre crítica amistosa, que se somete a la fuerza de la marca o intenta extenderla, y crítica crítica, o crítica confrontacional, que limita la fuerza de la marca o la recontextualiza. También Roger Sell habla de cómo hay que evitar la presunción de un contexto único).
Derrida enfatiza mucho la iterabilidad de la marca, "the power the inscription has, once it is inscribed, to continue working in the complete absence of the intentional structure that originally inhabited it" (106). (Pero—¿completa? Evitemos extremos, otra vez. Una marca en ausencia total de intención ni siquiera es ya una marca. Una letra que no sabemos qué sonido representa no es ni siquiera ella misma. Un texto puede convertirse en un objeto físico, pero deja de ser el texto del que estábamos hablando. Una mesa puede ser leña, pero si la quema un fuego en una casa, no es una mesa para el fuego, sólo madera).
"Derrida (...) sees in the force iterability has to enter history the chance for a new ethics and a new politics, the politics of what he calls 'the democracy to come' " (106).
Platón ya hablaba de la iteración, viéndola como una amenaza, diciendo que un escrito nunca se sabe a quién puede dirigirse: "Writing is a 'drifter', a homeless vagrant. The difference, and it is a big difference, is that what Plato sees as a danger and an enfeebling, Derrida sees as a new force and as a chance, a piece of good luck" (107) — (Derrida parece así ser, como William Gibson o Stephen Jay Gould, un admirador o contemplador de la exaptación,
"the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e. abandoned it to its essential drift" (Derrida, Limited Inc., cit. en Miller 107).
Aquí disiento de la manera en que se usa el concepto de "legibilidad". Si hemos perdido el código, por ejemplo, el signo ya no es legible. Algo podemos hacer con él, quizá, utilizarlo decorativamente por ejemplo, pero no leerlo. Y hay veces en que sí conviene tener presente lo que quería decir conscientemente el autor, para obtener una lectura más ajustada más allá de la sola evidencia del texto. O sea, que sí, la escritura va vagabunda y errante, pero por ese camino se pierden unos sentidos y se adquieren otros. El mismo Derrida apunta a esto cuando habla de la no saturabilidad del contexto:
"For a context never creates itself ex nihilo; no mark can create or engender a context on its own, much less dominate it" (Limited Inc., cit. en Miller 111). Para Miller hay una relación dialéctica entre acto de habla y contexto: dialéctica retroactiva por la que nuestra acción verbal busca autosustentarse invocando y creando con palabras el contexto que la apoya:
"The context is there already, but it becomes a context only when the speech act intervenes within it, however weakly and without power to saturate it. The speech act nevertheless transforms the context it enters, even though in retrospect that context seems to have been there already as the ground of the speech act's efficacy. This power to intervene in the context, even if not to dominate it, is the emancipatory chance opened by a speech-act theory based on iterability." (111). (Esta aproximación a la pragmática del acto de habla puede compararse con la de Jenny Thomas, en su libro Meaning in Interaction, donde enfatizaba que los actos de habla no vienen ya perfilados sino sujetos a negociación retroactiva, y que el contexto también es articulado dialécticamente con el uso del lenguaje).
Este poder retroactivo del acto de habla lleva a un análisis de la teoría ética y política de Derrida, una teoría transformadora, donde "the performative utterance creates the conventions it needs in order to be efficacious, rather than depending on their prior existence for its felicity" (Miller 112). La ética de la enseñanza es así problemática, pues una enseñanza nueva traiciona sus bases, o crea bases nuevas que no son las pactadas con la institución: "Someone can always come along with the charge: 'What you are teaching has no authority, no validity. You are not speaking the truth'." (114). Depende de cómo se reciba:
"Speech acts often generate an intepersonal situation in which the necessary response to one speech act is another speech act, even if the latter act is silence or a mute gesture, as when a beggar asks for alms and I pass by without giving anything or lift my hand and shake my head in a gesture of refusal. The border between speech acts proper and gestures that function as implicit speech acts is blurred. The distinction between gestural and verbal speech acts is impossible to draw, as both Austin and Derrida knew. It might be better to speak of 'sign acts', a more inclusive term." (116).
En el análisis de Derrida, los actos de habla 'ideales' y abstractos (promesas, afirmaciones, preguntas, declaraciones, excusas) — se vuelven mucho más borrosos e indecidibles en los casos concretos. Miller también comenta la Declaración de Independencia de los USA: "'All men are created equal', but that does not include slaves or women, for example Jefferson's black mistress" (120). Un rasgo esencial del análisis derrideano de la Declaración es "the way the Declaration of Independence depends on the thing it creates. It lifts itself by its own bootstraps, itself makes the foundation on which it builds the new state. (. . . .) The Declaration creates that in the name of which it speaks" (124), y crea la comunidad de sus firmantes y adherentes, en cuyo nombre habla. La importancia de la firma: "La signature invente le signataire (. . . ) dans une sorte de rétroactivité fabuleuse" (Derrida, Declarations of Independence, cit. en Miller 124). Crea la nueva ley que la hace legal. Así, "paradigmatic performatives disobey all the requisites for a felicitious speech act as laid down by Austin, at least in his initial analyses early in How to Do Things with Words. The Declaration of Independence creates the law by which it acts rather than depending on preexisting rules. It breaks the preexisting law rather than sustaining it." (125). Y lo mismo sucede, según Derrida, con las declaraciones de amor, promesas, mentiras y demás actos de habla. Esta teoría de Derrida, como la de Austin, también es un acto de habla inaugural, una nueva visión de la acción política y ética como radicalmente inaugural. (Demasiado radicalmente inaugural para mí: mejor buscar además los precedentes, que siempre los hay, y estudiar las fuerzas no declaradas que hacen las revoluciones posibles). Una ética y política de la iterabilidad. (Bueno, pues eso. Si es iterable, además de tener una differentia specifica, también tendrá algo de común con otros casos, ¿no?).
Derrida relaciona la cuestión de la inauguralidad, y de la determinación del contexto mediante el acto de habla, con otro tema que le es caro: la liminalidad, la frontera entre contrarios o campos separados, siempre problemática para él. "The outside penetrates and thus determines the inside. This is what I have analyzed so often, and for so long, under the words 'supplement', 'parergon', and each time that I have said of the trait of writing or of inscription (for instance, that which marks the limit of a corpus or of a context) that it was divisible and that it erased itself in the very process of marking [dans son marquage même]." (Derrida, Limited Inc., cit. en Miller 130).
("Je t'aime")
"Derrida explores the phrase 'Je t'aime' ('I love you') as an exemplification of the speech act theory he wants to put in place of Austin's or Searle's" (134). Requiere la fe de quien se lo escucha decir, es una aseveración que no se puede comprobar: "my locution 'Je t'aime' is always implicitly, even sometimes explicitly, accompanied by something like 'I swear to your that what I say is true'. ( . . . ) Uttering 'Je t'aime' is in turn an exemplary case of bearing witness" (135). Otro corolario: "Like the Declaration of Independence", 'Je t'aime' creates the event it names" (137). Es decir, la expresión y el sentimiento interno no están divorciados: Derrida siempre atiende a la materialidad del signo, y critica el "puro sentido" independiente de todo signo. Austin ya argumentaba contra una postura un tanto derrideana, y se volvía a encenagar con el tema, en su ensayo sobre "Pretending", donde comenzaba argumentando contra la noción de otro filósofo de que no estás airado hasta que expresas la ira.
De hecho, según Derrida, la expresión sí transforma la interioridad. Decir 'Je t'aime' no es meramente describir o constatar algo: es elegir, es transformarnos. Todos los actos de habla están interpenetrados de acción, no hay metalenguaje inocente: "since all mention is to some degree use and even the most deliberately constative statement has an element of the performative, and vice versa. I cannot say or write 'Je t'aime' without to some degree using it" (139). (Aquí Miller nos declara a los lectores su amor, y yo: pero no quiero a todos igual, ojo no os confundáis).
3. Paul de Man
Empezando por la imposibilidad de distinguir entre enunciaciones performativas y constativas, de Man lleva su análisis de los actos de habla hasta los límites en los que se problematiza la propia inteligibilidad. "This, he argues, makes it forever uncertain whether it is possible to ascertain what has been done with words and who or what should be held responsible for it, or even if it is possible to do anything with words at all" (141). La función referencial del lenguaje performativo supuestamente nos permite saber lo que hacemos con las palabras a la vez que lo hacemos. Esto resulta ser imposible. (Ya decía el "player king" de Hamlet que nuestras palabras son nuestras, pero en lo que van a parar no tenemos mucha parte).
This reminds me of something De Man said in a seminar at Yale. A speech act, he commented, makes something happen all right, but it is never what is intended or what is predicted beforehand. You aim at a bear and some innocent bird falls out of the sky. (144).
(Hay, por tanto, una especie de Ley de Murphy, o ley de Man, del acto de habla, la ley del fracaso perlocucionario: "Lo que digas nunca tendrá los efectos buscados". O, para mayor precisión, es imposible saber si los tendrá, o tendrá parte de ellos y parte también de efectos no buscados, en grado impredecible. Esta es una cuestión que podemos relacionar con la dinámica entre comprensión y crítica en la interacción comunicativa: da lugar a las formas de respuesta crítica a una enunciación que yo llamo crítica amistosa y crítica crítica. Un autor busca una respuesta crítica amistosa, pero frecuentemente encuentra un crítico en lugar de un amigo. La intención traza un plan de interacción comunicativa y la figura de un receptor implícito, pero el plan siempre fracasa, el receptor efectivo no se ajusta a los rasgos del receptor implícito invocado, y las contingencias del contexto dan al acto de habla y su producción una historia que es resultado de la impredecibilidad. En mi artículo sobre "La espiral hermenéutica" he señalado cómo esta distancia entre lo dicho y lo entendido se vuelve perceptible desde un tercer punto de vista, y cómo esta estructura de no coincidencia da lugar a la susodicha espiral consistente en interpretaciones, desplazamientos de sentido, recontextualizaciones e interpretaciones más inclusivas).
Siempre me ha llamado la atención la mala fe de la interpretación que da Paul de Man sobre las excusas de Rousseau en el episodio de la cinta robada (en Allegories of Reading). Yo lo relaciono un tanto instintivamente con su propia incapacidad para excusarse abiertamente por su etapa colaboracionista. Hillis Miller no hace esa lectura, se limita a constatar que "Excuses, de Man concludes, are performed by language itself, not by the willing, intending subject" (146) —algo que parece difícil de comprender o de compartir. Aunque muchas veces sí aceptemos una excusa sólo de palabra, eso es por la intencionalidad que hay detrás de esas palabras (aunque sea intencionalidad de pactar o llegar a un compromiso, y no de excusarse sinceramente).
En cualquier caso, es esto algo inherente a la pragmática de Man: "Language, on its own, witout any help from man or woman, from his or her subjectivit and its intentions, posits itself, in a violent and senseless act of positing. This positing is a speech act, but of a most anomalous kind, since it is detached from the ego with its conscious intentions" (Miller 148). Esta teoría es a su vez un acto performativo para Miller, uno frecuentemente repetido en su obra: un aviso. "His entire work might be defined as a warning. This happens, however, most decisively and strategically through a characteristic and often repeated move that is a performative utterance disguised as a constative one" (150). Un aviso contra la "locura de las palabras", el lenguaje fuera de nuestro control. Aunque para Miller "to say 'language speaks' looks like a prosopopoeia to me" (152). Para de Man ignoramos nuestro propio lenguaje; la teoría quiere ser lúcida y constativa, pero sólo dice su verdad cuando hace algo, cuando se vuelve narrativa y performativa. Cualquier texto es constativo y performativo a la vez, pero estos aspectos están en tensión, no cuentan la misma verdad. "The tension between the two functions means that the performative aspect of the text makes it produce deceptive, illusory knowledge, or the illusion of knowledge" (153). (Yo casi diría que es al revés, es el sentido constativo el más mentiroso para de Man, y el otro, performativo, el que produce insight). Sea como sea, "The text always overshoots or undershoots the target it aims at: 'It always produces a little more or a little less than the original, theoretical input' (AR, 271). Die Sprache verspricht (sich). " (154). (Cf. la espiral hermenéutica, que nos lleva a interpretar aspectos no lógicamente codificados del texto como parte de su sentido, de lo que "hace" si no de lo que dice). Esto lleva a de Man a un resultado paradójico (quizá su propia teoría esté así pidiendo a gritos ser desconstruida): "As related to the unintelligible or 'based on it', no statement is either true or false, though it may be performatively effective in unforeseen and unknowable ways" (154). (Bueno, maticemos: unforeseen hasta que se producen efectivamente, y unknowable hasta que viene un analista o crítico a sacarlos a la luz mediante una interpretación. Eran imprevisibles e incognoscibles; Miller no deja claro, o no comparte, este salir a la luz o construirse de la verdad del texto. Del mismo modo, podemos decir que en sí misma ninguna afirmación es verdadera o falsa. Siempre es verdadera o falsa para alguien y en un contexto discursivo determinado).
4. Passion performative: Derrida, Wittgenstein, Austin
El cambio en el régimen de comunicaciones puede llevar, según Derrida, al fin de la literatura, de la filosofía, del psicoanálisis y de las cartas de amor. Y Derrida mismo ha contribuido a ello con sus escritos, a pesar de su amor por la literatura. "If Derrida is right—and I believe he is—the new regime of telecommunications is bringing literature to an end by transforming all those factors that were its preconditions or its concomitants" (157). El nuevo régimen comunicativo lleva a mayor apertura, como una postal que puede ser leída por todos. "The postcard or e-mail message, if it falls under my eye, is meant for me, or I take it as meant for me, whoever its addressee may be" (158) (—¿pero no es esta capacidad de común a todos los escritos, como decía Platón en el Fedro? ¿Aún más, a todos los signos?).
Las pasiones no son desgajables de los signos que las comunican o articulan, y son transmitidas por ellos infecciosamente. En términos de actos de habla, se trata aquí de "the problem of whether the outward expression of passion, in words or other signs, simply reports, constatively, an emotion that already exists inwardly, or whether the outer expression creates, performatively, the inner passion. Do I first feel love and then say 'I love you,' or does saying 'I love you' bring about the passionate state of being in love?" (159).
Esta asociación de pasión y expresión es lo que funda la pasión por la literatura, una pasión lectora e interpretativa, más allá de cualquier secreto efectivo que contenga el texto. Una pasión performativa, no constativa.
Wittgenstein se planteaba la existencia de un lenguaje privado que sería necesario para expresar los sentimientos privados. (¿No sería el estilo este lenguaje privado?). Hillis Miller lo plantea en términos de articulación de una nueva figura expresiva: la catacresis, un intento de expresar lo inexpresable: "the goal of poetry for Hopkins, like the goal of narrative for Proust, is to find some way to speak this unspeakable, this wholly other of my private emotions" (161).
La incomunicabilidad de lo interior, del otro, problema para Wittgenstein. "One escape from this impasse is to say—recalling Derrida and, as I shall show, Austin—not that pain or any other passion in the other is hidden away somewhere and then expressed, but that the expression is the passion or is indistinguishable from the passion (two very different things, and that is the problem)." (164).
Wittgenstein une las emociones a sus síntomas corporales, y más generalmente a su expresión. "This is, I think, what William James meant when he said that a man doesn't cry because he is sad but that he is sad because he cries" (Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, cit. en Miller 164). (Aquí se adivina una reducción de los noumenos emocionales a una fenomenología o semiótica corporal, en un movimiento paralelo en cierto modo a la epokhé de Husserl). Miller lo plantea en términos austinianos: "Is the 'expression' of an emotion, whether by words or by signs such as weeping or frowning, related to the emotion cognitively or performatively?" (165). Para él, también, la expresión forma parte del sentimiento, éste no puede disciarse totalmente de su expresión, por absurdo que parezca a veces decir que nos enamoramos por decir "Je t'aime".
Pseudo-excurso sobre "perhaps" como palabra que expresa la incertidumbre necesaria para la vida humana: "As long as I can say 'perhaps', I am still alive, still waiting for something unexpected, whereas if I know for sure, then the future is entirely programmed and predictable, not really a human life anymore, or at any rate not worth living. The human ability to say 'perhaps' is perhaps a sign of a distinctively human way to be related to time, that is, by putting off indefinitely the last word of certainty. 'Perhaps' defines human temporality as such, even though, it is oriented, we all 'know', toward the future definitive event of death that will come sooner or later to all, though luckily we do not, at least not usually, know just when. That perhaps is what Hamlet means when he says 'The readiness is all'. 'Perhaps' is a way of saying 'Yes, I am ready', ready even for death, when that event comes." (168).
Austin debate sobre la pasión y su expresión realizativa en respuesta a Errol Benford, que en Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society sostenía que la ira consistía enteramente en la expresión de la ira. Austin no rebate eso, y además su artículo sobre el fingimiento resulta inconclusivo. Cuenta allí un sueño extraño, en el que se le aparece la frase: "Neither a be-all nor an end-all be". Austin se resiste a totalizaciones y conclusiones. Eso es bueno para mantener el análisis indefinidamente abierto, pero por otra parte revela que "he may be reluctant to reach the undesired conclusion toward which his thinking is nevertheless remorselessly tending" (172)—a saber, la conclusión de que el lenguaje de las emociones pueda ser eminentemente realizativo, no constativo (a la Errol Benford, pues). "The other facet is the fear that it may be impossible ever to know for sure whether the other is angry or loves me. The two fears are aspects of the same fear. Only so long as the game continues in a 'perhaps' that forbids premature closure and keeps open the hope for a break-through event transforming the fear into a happy certainty can the philosopher playing the ordinary-language game keep bogged down on the periphery. Only by prolonging the game can he or she stay away from the center that generates such excessive anxiety" (172). Austin quiere justificar el orden público, y ve que puede quedarse sin fundamentos comunicativos para ello—para exigir responsabilidades ante la ley. "A passion for law and order always lies somewhat covertly beehind Austin's lighthearted jokes about how can we be sure that little bird is a goldfinch or how we can know that man is anbry unless he takes a ferocious bit out of the carpet" (173). El lenguaje, como veía de Man, es inseguro y resbaladizo. Austin quería evitar el llegar a esa conclusión y por eso sus teorías se quedan siempre empantanadas en la periferia. "The sharpness of Austin's thinking, however, leads him to recognize, through careful discriminations and painstaking analyses, that 'I promise' and 'I know' are both forms of what he was later to call a performative utterance" (174). Al enunciar una "verdad", aunque sea auto-evidente (como en la Declaración de Independencia), nos comprometemos éticamente; una afirmación es una declaración de creencias o una toma de partido, una adopción de compromisos. Como dice Austin, "believing in other persons, in authority and testimony, is an essential part of the act of communicating, and act which we all constantly perform" (Austin, Philosophical Papers, cit. en Miller 175 —cursiva mía).
"We believe in the testimony of other persons all the time, for example when my beloved says 'Je t'aime', and we had better believe them, since law, order, communication, felicitous marriages, and the happy working of society depend on such belief, even though that belief flies in the teeth of the evidence that we can never have sufficient grounds for such confidence" (176).
5. Marcel Proust
Proust también se plantea el problema de la incognoscibilidad de los otros; ya cité aquí su reflexion sobre la impenetrabilidad de Françoise. Hillis Miller observa que reducimos una persona y sus múltiples facetas para hacerla intepretable, simplificándola metonímicamente, haciendo que uno solo de sus aspectos reduzca a toda la persona. También le lleva esto a reflexionar sobre su selección de ejemplos de Proust: al elegir un ejemplo, hacemos que el ejemplo sea una metonimia del resto, la parte por el todo. La crítica literaria (y la vida social también) es metonímica.
Especialmente figurativa es la relación amorosa. Al decir a alguien que la amamos, quedamos condenados a ignorar la realidad de esa persona; nuestra pasión ocupa el lugar de la persona real. La realidad, dice Proust, es una función de nuestros instrumentos de percepción, y el otro nunca puede presentarse directamente, sólo "apresentarse", aparecernos sin estar presente. Conocer al otro "is a matter of faith, a performative positing, not a verifiable knowledge" (183). Todo ideología: "ideas que no se manifiestan pero no por ello dejan de actuar". Al no poder acceder directamente a los sentimientos de Françoise, Marcel debe interpretar oscuros y contradictorios signos, y en última instancia tomar una opción, decidir performativamente: "Since those interpretations can never be checked directly against the hidden object that casts the shadow, anything we can say about that object (the mind and feelings of the other) is not a constative statement of fact but a statement of belief, a form of testimony, a performative utterance: 'I hold that Françoise loves me' or 'I hold that Françoise hates me'." (185). "This assumption that the other is an impenetrable shadow, a shadow that emits contradictory signs open to endlessly varied contradictory hypotheses, all equally unverifiable, all equally fueled by one emotional need or another, is the presupposition of all Marcel's presentation of human life" (185). Analiza a continuación Miller el episodio de las Vírgenes Vigilantes.
A las Parcas escapa Proust mediante la escritura sin fin previsto: "Proust dilates and delays, stealing with each invention a moment more of life, just as Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, so frequently referred to in the Recherche, told story after story, thereby avoiding execution". (198). Quizá lo mismo se pueda aplicar a todo escritor del libro de su vida, incluido Miller, o a todo bloguero que cumple llenando una entrada más.
Y a continuación un último episodio de la Recherche, que también tiene que ver con la ceguera del amor: la ceguera fascinada (¿o es una visión negada a ojos profanos?) de Saint-Loup frente a su amada Rachel quand du Seigneur, "une simple petite grue". Este episodio, como muchos otros en la obra de Proust,
"seems to oppose a mystified view, generated by passion and leading to a performative 'reading into' of trivial signs, in this case Rachel's face, to the demystified view that sees the signs as no more than crudely material, not valid signs for anything, that is, sees them truly as what they are" (200).
El signo que leemos fascinados es sin embargo más auténtico para Miller, porque la lectura en profundidad del signo requiere esa fascinación. ¿Qué sería del amor por la literatura sin la colaboración del lector? ¿Sin las invenciones del crítico? ¿"une simple petite grue"? ¿Y qué sería del amor a secas? Todo signos triviales, a los que preferimos dar importancia. O se la damos, sin proponérnoslo realmente. Y así damos nuevos nombres, o nicks, a los seres amados, un bautismo como acto performativo por excelencia, "naming as a sovereign speech act making or remaking the one who is named" (207).
Esta es la dimensión religiosa del libro de Miller. El creyente en una divinidad cualquiera no conoce de modo constativo, sino realizativo, mediante un acto de compromiso personal que a la vez lo ciega (lo mistifica) y le da acceso a una realidad inaccesible para quien no se compromete de ese modo,
"a realm of beauty that is lost in a past that never was, though it is treasured as a 'memory', a memory without memory, and hoped for in a future that always remains future, the 'recompense which we strive to earn' (E2: 163; F2: 459). All works of the imagination—love, music, literature, art—however illusory in fetishizing this or that embodiment of beauty, give us a glimpse of this lost paradise, or rather these lost paradises, since they are multiple and incommensurate, each in its own separate and sequestered place in the capacious realm of the imagination. This multiple and unattainable beauty is allegorized by means of catachreses that employ the illusions of love as well as by the fictitious, factitious creations of poetry. These are used to name something unknown, unknowable, and unnamable in any literal words." (208). Así, Proust celebra la imaginación humana y su capacidad de alcanzar verdades ocultas, "accessible not to reason but to performative speech acts" (211). Y es la capacidad de crear signos, desplazando el sentido literal, la que nos da acceso a esta dimensión sobrenatural (o sea, propiamente humana) de la existencia, como en el episodio en el que Marcel decide que unos árboles podrían ser perfectamente ángeles, tesoreros de nuestros recuerdos de la Edad de Oro, guardianes de la promesa de que la realidad no es lo que suponemos. Signos sobrenaturales, traduciéndose unos en otros, tropos que convierten a los árboles en ángeles, o transfiguran a esa mujer corriente y vulgar, haciendo de ella "a deep enigma" (213).
Coda: Allegory as Speech Act
Si En busca del tiempo perdido es, como decía Paul de Man, una alegoría de su propia lectura, una alegoría de lo que pasa cuando interpretamos la lectura, un intento de leerla sólo nos llevará a más actos performativos de sentar sentido. La interpretación es un acto de habla realizativo, una manera de hacer cosas con palabras, no una constatación de un significado existente; nos vemos así abocados a "the incompatibility between knowing through or by words and doing things with words that is perpetually demonstrated, as this book has tried to show, by speech acts in literature" (214-15). La interpretación viene de la propia pasión y de la llamada del otro que sentimos, mediada por un texto. La interpretación, a su vez, da lugar a un nuevo texto que constituye una nueva llamada a más respuestas... que a su vez puede ser o no atendida por sus lectores. "This constitutes another demand for response. It is a demand for which I, as the one who has first responded, must, and hereby do, take responsibility" (215).
Aunque a mí me parece que la responsabilidad del autor por el hecho de solicitar o invitar respuesta queda un tanto diluida por el elemento de proyección y autofascinación que va a haber en las respuestas de los lectores, según nos lleva a concluir el propio Miller. Habrán de ser estos quienes se responsabilicen de sus propias interpretaciones. Como tampoco somos responsables de quienes se enamoran de nosotros proyectando sus propias necesidades y fantasías sobre nuestra persona. Sí de las fantasías compartidas, o toleradas.
La tesis central del libro, la inevitabilidad de un compromiso ético y de una decisión a la hora de usar el lenguaje, amplía la teoría ética de Miller en The Ethics of Reading. Cada vez es más inmediata para Miller, y más subrayada, la responsabilidad directa de quien interpreta algo. Interpretar es elegir, tomar partido (y responder es interpretar). En una entrevista reciente en el European English Messenger (15.1, 2006), señala igualmente que cada juez a la hora de decidir si la ley es aplicable o no a un caso, debe interpretar y decidir, hacerse responsable. Y así hace la ley a cada momento, más allá de aplicarla. También eso es un acto de habla. Lo mismo en la interpretación literaria: "Any interpretation implies a speech act: 'I declare this work means so and so'." (Messenger 25). Hacerse responsable es, en primer lugar, hacerse responsable de que la respuesta que damos es la nuestra: no creer que no estamos interviniendo, o eligiendo ("sólo aplicando la ley, o una teoría", etc.). No podemos "aplicar" un método preestablecido para producir una lectura éticamente responsable; antes deberemos someter el metodo a una lectura crítica. No todo acto ético es moral, y no todo acto moral es ético; Miller contrapone la moral a la ética como lo aceptado convencionalmente frente a las decisiones relativas a valores que se adoptan individualmente en una situación determinada: en suma, el método frente a la interpretación creativa. "You must read for yourself, and are always on your own when you do that" (25). La actuación (sea mediante la palabra o mediante otras acciones) siempre tiene un componente ético e interpretativo, y hasta una dimensión inaugural y creativa. Siempre solos a la hora de decidir, aunque decidamos en compañía de toda nuestra comunidad y de las autoridades.
(Así, Miller decide que la protagonista de Beloved de Toni Morrison hace bien en matar a sus niños antes de devolverlos a la esclavitud - "her decision was just, since it was inaugural, inititatory" (25) —y yo sin embargo decido que hace mal, por muy inaugural que sea su decisión, y muy contextualizada, y por mucho que crean ella, y Morrison, y Miller, que hace bien. Una decisión ética para ella, quizá, pero inmoral. No en sí, claro—sino para el juicio ético y moral de este lector).
Jacques Derrida on Religion
Adam Smith y los animalistas
Adam Smith y los animalistas
EL ANIMALISMO—UNA RELIGIÓN CON OTRAS PRIORIDADES. La muerte de un torero se ha convertido en un motivo de celebración para muchos antitaurinos y animalistas, algunos de los cuales ponen la vida del toro por delante de la del torero. Aquí, sin ser partidarios de la tauromaquia, deploramos la religión animalista que equipara a personas y animales.
Estos días de gran calentón animalista con ocasión del torero muerto Víctor Barrio, pongo este comentario en el facebook de mis amistades animalistas:
Adam Smith, un sabio moralista escocés, decía que (contra lo que suponemos muchas veces, o contra lo que predican algunas doctrinas, religiosas incluso) no sentimos lo mismo, ni hemos de sentir lo mismo, por todos los seres por igual. Los más cercanos nos son más cercanos que los más lejanos, y del mismo modo que apreciamos a nuestros familiares más que a los desconocidos, es normal que sintamos más cercanía con quienes nos son más cercanos en todos los sentidos. Por eso, entre otras cosas, sentimos más la muerte de un toro que la de un pez. Creo que es bueno, en general, para nuestros afectos, el distribuirlos de esta manera razonable (y habitual). Sentir lo mismo por todos los seres vivos por igual nos lleva a callejones morales sin salida y a conflictos irresolubles.
Añadiré que incluso con un torero carnicero (por así llamarlo) tienen los animalistas mucho más en común que con un toro, aunque no compartan ni aprueben su disposición a matar toros. Comparten con él la naturaleza humana, que los implica a todos en un mundo de una riqueza y variedad cognitiva, emocional, ética y cultural que potencialmente va mucho más allá de su identificación emotiva con el toro y su muerte. El no ser capaces de ver esto, el perder de vista la prioridad de la comunidad humana, es una forma de miopía moral, lamentablemente muy extendida.
Ahora que, cada vez tengo más claro que el animalismo es una religión, con una misión iluminada que cumplir. Y que esa religión y esa misión exigen a sus creyentes una ceguera hacia muchas cosas humanas que les son ajenas, para mejor poder desempeñar su misión religiosa y activista. El conflicto con los intereses humanos habituales y las prioridades humanas de andar por casa no detendrá a quienes ponen en pie de igualdad a humanos y animales, y consideran un "asesinato" la muerte de un toro. Es una religión que consta en su mayoría de conversos, y de ahí también su ardor creyente.
El animalismo ha adquirido cierta visibilidad y prominencia social, e incluso puede que tenga una influencia importante en determinados aspectos de la ética general en relación a los animales. Pero sólo en algunos. Una ética religiosa tal tiene sus límites políticos: como cualquier menú exótico, es para gustos especiales, y marginales, aunque muchos puedan probarlo ocasionalmente. Y aunque parezca a veces un desvarío oriental, la religión animalista es (en realidad) un lujo occidental.
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