From: colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 13:11:34 -0700
Subject: Re: the reality check is in the mail


Lois Shawver wrote:
> 
> Colin,
> 
> Thank you for your last note.  It highlighted nice dimensions of the
> issue we are pondering.  I liked your pointing, for example, to
> different kinds of ruses.
> 
> And, if I get your picture of things, I think you want to say that the
> statement "everything is a ruse" is itself a ruse.  The important
> question, to my mind, is: Is everything "only" a ruse.  Or, is it
> possible to distinguish, as indeed, you have done between different
> kinds of ruses. You distinguished between the negative and affirmative,
> consider the difference between the sincere and the insincere.
> 
> When I was a very little girl, I learned a trick. My mother was coming
> after me once to spank me and I somehow I said to her, not knowing what
> I was saying, "Don't mommy!  I didn't do it on purple!"  And this broke
> my mother up.  I was trying to say, of course, that I didn't do it on
> "purpose."  Pretty useful trick, huh? I used it a couple of times, I
> think, until it lost its force.
> 
> Another time, when I was an older child, another situation arose.
> Everything turned out okay, but imagine this drama:  I was ten and I
> stayed home from school with tonsilitis.  My mother was in the kitchen
> cooking. She was wearing spike heels (we are talking about 1950,
> perhaps), and my baby brother was in a highchair by her side.  On that
> day, I was lying on the living room sofa with my head in the bay window,
> a window that, from my position, would give a complete view of our small
> front yard.  I was facing the other way, but somehow, I heard some
> strange noise, a kind of rustling sound.  I turned around, and the whole
> front lawn was on fire!  A lawn of fire, two feet high, wrapped all the
> way around the bay window!
> 
> I jumped up in alarm and ran into the kitchen.  I was saying something
> like, "The lawn's on fire! The lawn's on fire!"  Now you should know
> that my mother was hard of hearing and she often had trouble
> understanding me.  She simply continued cooking while she said, "Lois,
> calm down, and tell me what you're trying to say so I can understand
> it."  I just couldn't do it.  Finally, I tried to grab her hand to take
> her into the living room to see the blaze.  She didn't want to leave th
> stove.  I pulled and pulled her hand.  Finally, she turned off the stove
> with a resigned and disbelieving sigh and dipped her hand around the
> corner.
> 
> Of course, she was dismayed and this started a series of incidents which
> ended in the everyone putting out the fire on the front lawn. Only a
> smallish tree was lost. But the house was nearly lost, or so it seemed
> to me (and to my mother, who, at one point, found herself trying to
> stamp out the fire in spike heels) while I carried the crying baby down
> the street hollering for help.
> 
> Now, in some sense, both of these communications can count as "ruses."
> In both cases, I was trying to get the other person to do something that
> I wanted. But one of these communications was, nevertheless, sincere,
> and one was not.  And that's the rub.
> 
> My concern is that recognizing that everything is (in the broadest sense
> of the word) a "ruse" is used sometimes to justify a kind of
> game-playing that was certainly never implied by Wittgenstein's notion
> of a "language game". It is used to justify insincerity.  After all, in
> the narrower sense fo that term, that is what "ruse" means.
> 
> That's okay, if that is your rhetorical purpose, to justify insincerity
> by calling everything a "ruse."  But there are reasons here and there
> when it is useful to make that distinction.  And the totalizing argument
> that everything is "REALLY" a ruse (transcendentally and beyond our
> conceptual system), for me, falls on incredulous ears.
> 
> ..Lois Shawver
> 
> The problem with such a totalizing statement, of course, is that on the
> surface, it also implies its opposite.  This makes it sound like
> "everything is a ruse" is itself false because the statement is only a
> ruse.
> 
> But I think the key comes in the word "only."
> 
> the problem with such a statement is that
> in the familiar paradox we find haunting totalizing statements or
> metanarratives.
> 
> A way out of such metanarratives is to be willing to make distinctions
> 
> We can always construct category (such as ruse) so as to capture
> everything in its net.
> 
> And everytime we construct such a category we both gain and lose.
> 
> I agree that it is almost (or perhaps always) possible to find a "ruse"
> dimension of anything anyone says.  However, I think this is because we
> are constructing the word "ruse" so that includes apples and oranges,
> that is things that could easily be distinguished if we invented another
> category system. Saying that everything is a ruse,
> 
> 

Lois,
      Your anecdote about the 'purple' ruse had me laughing out loud.
You were obviously a very clever child indeed! It was interesting that
it lost it's force after repeated usage. I suppose this shows that ruses
tend to disguise themselves as such, and that, when exposed for what
they are, they can no longer take that particular form.
      I'm not too sure that your sincere/insincere distinction is robust
enough to allow for the kind of differentiation you are wanting to make.
How is the 'purple' ruse insincere? I think it would be fair to say that
you sincerely did not want to be spanked. If a ruse is used with a
particular intention (and it is difficult to imagine a non-intentional
ruse, although perhaps Freud's notion of the Dream Work might be a place
to start) then isn't it to this degree always sincere? Interestingly,
linguists analyzing speech acts are incredibly dogmatic about a similar
sincerity clause. For instance, Searle's theories pretty much stand and
fall on this issue. Derrida, in 'Limited Inc' has shown how fragile this
position is. Searle would like to lay down a law: the adoption of a
grammatical form should represent adherence to the rules of that form.
This amounts to a kind of Categorical Imperative, but as Lyotard has
shown, prescriptives are not deriveable. And yet this imperative is at
the very heart of the sincerity condition, as Searle indicates:
       ...When one performs the speech act one necessarily expresses
         the sincerity condition, and thus to conjoin the performance of 
         the speech act with the denial of the sincerity condition would 
         be to express and to deny the presence of one and the same 
         psychological state. 
         (Searle and Vanderveken, 'Foundations of Illocutionary
Logic'          (1985), p.19)
Searle is very much in line with Frege here, in attempting to iron out
all negativity under an equivalence thesis. I think you are trying to do
something similar with your own sincerity/insincerity distinction. The
semantic contortions below, however, index the beginnings of an infinite
regress, which formal linguists see it as their duty to reign in. The
word 'denegation' stands in here for the kind of insincerity you are
concerned about.
         Each illocution commits the speaker to the denegation of its 
         illocutionary denegation.
         (Searle and Vanderveken (1985), p.54)
         A speaker who accepts a proposal to do something is committed 
         to the act of illocutionary denegation of not refusing to do
it.
         (Searle and Vanderveken (1985), p.154)
   The awkwardness of these sentences suggest to me that Searle is
trying to make language do something it cannot. Derrida exposes that
there is nothing to stop one from eliding this supposed commitment. In
this sense, the illocutionary act denegated by 'Limited Inc' is that of
the sincerity imputed upon him both by Searle, and the tradition of
analytic philosophy to which Searle appeals to legitimate his own
position. 
      I don't want to sound like I am championing insincerity over
sincerity here. I am rather calling into question the validity of the
opposition itself, at least with regard to ruses. From whose perspective
is this sincerity to be established? When, as a young girl, you occupied
the pole of the addressor, you were sincere in employing the ruse of
'purple': you genuinely didn't want to be smacked. Your mother, as
addressee, could not really say that she had been the recipient of an
insincere phrase: neither truth nor earnestness were at stake when you
said 'purple' instead of 'purpose'. The affect engendered by your ruse
would traverse both distinctions between sincerity and insincerity, just
as performatives are not assimilable to the truth/falsity binary.
      You are happy to call your second example (with the flaming lawn)
sincere because the stakes in that situation were clearly to do with
reaching a mutual understanding (that the house was in danger of burning
down). You seem to call the first 'purple' example insincere because you
were deflecting the intentions of your mother. Sometimes, however,
deflecting intentions is an ethical necessity. I think then it might be
better if you phrased you concerns in terms of consensus and dissensus
rather than sincerity and insincerity? In this last form, to repeat what
I think I have said to you many times, consensus is indeed vitally
important. Where you and I differ is that I think of consensus as always
owing a debt to rhetoric, as being constructed by discourse, whereas you
think of it in more transparent terms as rooted in agreement over an
empirical or objective reality. Is this characterization fair? I'm not
sure. I say it because of your comment:  
   "And the totalizing argument that everything is "REALLY" a ruse
(transcendentally and beyond our conceptual system), for me, falls on
incredulous ears."
The locus of our difference lies in the words 'is "Really"' (which is
also the territory of Heidegger's 'Being and Time'). For me, and for
Lyotard in the way I read him, 'is' and 'really' are always discursively
established, rather than ontologically prior to anything one might say
about what 'really is'.
cheers,
Col