Chomsky/Bergson

B.F. Skinner got a bad rap for saying that speaking is the combination and recombination of memorized words and phrases. Noam Chomsky made his academic reputation on the basis of pointing out the simple fact that this recombination is nearly limitless. We can make an almost unlimited number of combinations and yet we do not: we make sentences that follow given patterns (subject; verb; object, etc.), and rarely make sentences that do not follow the basic patterns of our language. 

We might, in a more inspired moment, say: "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." But only in a very inspired mood would we say "Ideas green (furiously colourless) sleep" or "Sleep ideas furiously colourless green." I like both of these sentences, and technically they are English -every bit as much as the first. Heidegger would certainly like the idea of green ideas  "greening." But we would have to agree with Chomsky that they are unlikely combinations in everyday situations.

The only type of sentence that would never be uttered by an English speaker (except maybe a Language Poet) would take the form "Never green unsleep colourlessly idea" or some other ungrammatical structure in which the noun cannot be distinguished from the verb, nor the adjective from the adjectival verb. In other words, parataxis is out in everyday speech, and syntax rules. 

The cornerstone of Chomsky's argument is that we can read new sentences. We interpret new sentences that we have never read and yet we understand them: we feel that they make sense, even though we might not be able to say what they mean, as in the "Colourless green ideas" example.

For Chomsky, this is an effect of syntax. The sentence is ordered in such a way that we recognize the form, and therefore we accept the sentence as meaningful even before we attribute meaning to it. If the form is the content, it is only that the syntactical form declares: "I am meaningful language, interpret me," or to put it in psychological terms "I am the product of an intention."

This structure-first way of looking at language allows us to explain how meaning can be portable. Once we get used to the phonemic/phonetic relation in an unknown accent, for example, our brain no longer expends so much energy to decode the new data. If both form and meaning were really in a perpetual flux (as say Deleuze would have it), we would not be able to connect the new sounds with words that we had memorized in a different accent. We would not have any tools to figure out that the Scotsman was saying "book" or the New Zealander was saying "chips" if we had learned English anywhere else.

But the structural approach cannot deal with meaning, as it is designed to exclude it. Structural semantics has withered in the U.S. since Chomsky killed it, but it has flourished in literature departments, especially in France, where it is the heir to a long tradition of rhetorical training.

 As Chomsky himself says, semantics is not structural. How do we diagram it? Well, using Venn diagrams and prototype diagrams and other vague modes of narrowing down naturally overlapping meanings. Even the individual components have vague limits.

The mess is all the greater when we attempt to find connections between form and content. We have to deal with the difficulties of mapping form and the problems of semantic indeterminacy. At the same time, we need to think about the nearly infinite relations that there could be between any formal properties and the multiple meanings that the word or phrase has. This is why the best thinkers, like Chomsky, on the one hand, and Skinner, on the other, refuse to enter into the other's territory. They cannot explain the better part of human behaviour (or of language use) but at least the small part that they can account for is solidly mapped. 

This is why Chomsky says that there is no causal relationship between his political motives (e.g. his belief in human equality) and his linguistic work, which he says has shown him that humans are plastic, capable of good and evil, etc. Like the Physiocrats before him and the pragmatists after him, Chomsky brackets out all question of will, of why we would want to something and whether that will is good in the first place.

The form cannot be related to the content. Beliefs are not related to the form in which they are stated. This too is Skinner's greatest achievement in psychology, for although he ignores language, he comes to remarkably similar conclusions about his chosen object of study. Human behaviour is neither moral nor immoral but trained and automatic.  

The "poetic" response to this problem is no more satisfying. Poets and French philosophers (led by Deleuze and Derrida, following Bergson) have argued that both meaning and content are in a permanent state of motion and that we should work to either increase the speed or to make our own thought more changeable. The map of a river is not the river but maybe we could make it more like one.

The problem with this argument is what I tried to point to above (i.e. that we need analytic tools to map repetitions and substitutions). If we do not accept any of the principles of syntax, we see everything as unending parataxis. We lose the ability to distinguish between relatively structured and unstructured language (say poetry and newspapers). 

There may be no way to treat so many problems directly at one time. We may have to accept the framing principle of various disciplines. But how then could we approach meaning as a whole? (A naive but nonetheless necessary question.)

If we posit some entity, such as Christendom or Western civilization, as the horizon for our meaning production, we immediately fall into a teleological trap. Where does the unity lie? We can start from content, like let's say Northrop Frye, and argue that Western civilization has a message for us (i.e. we will be liberated from history) and that it has been encoded in the Bible and/or Greek mythology, only to be decoded and represented through Western literature. 

Or we can join his old sparring partner Marshall McLuhan, and start from the format of the message: the liberating force of Christianity caused Western society to produce technology which translated the optimistic message into the content of the next generation of media, which was itself transformed into the content of the next generation of media; the medium is the message because the message made the media and was remade by it. In both cases, we have one message (the same message) which is conveyed through the system by its own force of optimism. 

What we find at the beginning and the end of the story is this message: that we will be liberated. It is both cause and effect, although they claim that it is carried in different ways: one by literature and the other by media themselves. Frye doesn't tell us how (or why) the message is conveyed by form (because he doesn't think it is possible to explain such a variable process). And McLuhan can't account for where the message came from or why it caused the production of technology. What emerges is two people coming to the same conclusions for opposed reasons. All content is really form and all form is really content. Difference of emphasis?  I hope not.

If we do not care about preserving the "tradition" or a given "horizon of meaning" or whatnot, we can forget entirely about the faults of these literary-historical just-so stories. But the teleological problem is not merely an effect of the imposition of unity, it is the effect of any attribution of meaning, which carries the same content/form problem on a smaller scale.