Ebook: The Aesthetics of Communication: Pragmatics and Beyond

AESTHETICIZING PRAGMATICS The Gamut of Pragmatics Pragmatics emerged among the sciences of language at the end of the 1960's in reaction to certain totalizing models in linguistics: structuralism (primarily in Europe) and generative grammar (initially in the United States). Certain disciples of Chomsky became dissatisfied with autono­ mous syntax and later with generative semantics: they decided to break away from their mentor. Whereas Chomsky continued to talk a lot about very little, they defied him by speaking very suggestively about an exces­ sively broad range of phenomena. Pragmatics -which Bar-Hillel consid­ ered as a 'wastebasket discipline' in the fifties - nevertheless gained respectability. The history of pragmatics spans, of course, much more than three decades. The Stoic conception of language, in the shadow of the great Greek tradition and therefore intensely subversive, had in fact a pragmatic aim. The term pragmatisch appears in Kant: it expresses a relation with a human goal, this goal being only determinable within a community. This characterization naturally inspires the pragmaticism of l the Neo-Kantian Charles Sanders Peirce . It is this Kant-Peirce lineage that led to Morris and Carnap's rather bland conceptions of pragmatics, after the heavy losses incurred by positivism and behaviorism. In any case, despite the constant presence of a pragmatic approach in the history of thought, this reassessment of pragmatics (against the triumphs proclaimed by structuralism and generativism) was experienced as a Significant break­ through. A whole range of pragmatics came to the attention of linguists.

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The dominant paradigm in the sciences of language conceives the subject-in-community as a truth-sayer, a communicator, and a player-economist. The major ontology of the human community reconstructs being-together as a system of interactions and transactions subject to the rules of economic rationality and, as a consequence, the community as source and target of finite strategical games. The primordial value then is the circulation of information and ideal communication is favored by the truth-functional status of our discourses. However, this dominant ontology has a few cracks. This is where the aesthetic dimension intrudes, establishing here and there the blink of an eye, shattering the economic, communicational, and truth-saying phantasm, scattering the field of being-together, fragmenting it. These aesthetic fringes conduct themselves according to the isotopy of blossoming, of rupture and fracture, of thresholds and discontinuity. Their effect is one of bedazzlement, trembling, shaking, upheaval, lightheadedness. Infinite games in conversation, the musicality of voices, understanding by flair and tact, the temporariness of nostalgic memory, reasonable pathos, are what has been emphasized in this book.