Logic and rhetoric in philosophical dialogue and cultural hermeneutics

Transcription

1 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE Logic and rhetoric in philosophical dialogue and cultural hermeneutics Han-liang CHang Throughout his illustrious career as a philosopher of language mediating several traditions, augusto Ponzio has never failed in promoting cross-cultural dialogue. Therefore, it would be only appropriate to honour him by addressing the ancient genre of philosophical dialogue and its theoretical implications in contemporary critical discourse. Philosophical dialogue as a genre has a time-honoured history. From classical to late antiquity, from the early Socratic dialogues of Plato, through the writings of Plutarch, Cicero, Tacitus, to Saint augustine s De Magistro and Contra Academicos, the genre had already undergone several mutations. it remained a dominant discourse from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and was popular among such diverse writers as Castiglione, galileo, More, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, locke, Diderot, and Voltaire. There was a revival of the genre in the mid to late twentieth century, closely related to the development of critical discourse of the time. although this special kind of writing is generally regarded as a non-literary genre, it nonetheless is capable of displaying some fundamental features of language in social use. Understood from the perspectives of logic and rhetoric, as well as linguistic pragmatics, the genre sheds much light on such important issues as discursive subjectivity, power relation between interlocutors and by inference users of language, and their respective truth-claims. The genre has received special attention from hermeneuticians like Hansgeorg gadamer and language philosophers in the wake of ludwig Wittgenstein. With the belated reception of Mikhail Bakhtin in the West, dialogism has become the focus of critical attention among literary critics, psychologists and anthropologists since the 1970s, including augusto Ponzio. Talking about anthropology, one is reminded that the major writings of gregory Bateson are largely encoded in dialogic form. and probably inspired by Bakhtin, Yuri lotman goes even further to assert that dialogue, with translation, is a mechanism of cultural evolution and cross-cultural exchange (lotman 2001: ). a similar genre, called zhuke wennan, host and guest queries and answers, can be found in Chinese philosophical discourse. Both the great Debate over name and substance in the Pre-Qin China and the later Buddhist Gongan open case are often represented in dramatic and dialogic form. Unfortunately, to date very little has been done to compare the Chinese and Western dialogue traditions (Chang 2007). Following the tradition established 19

2 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING by Socrates, who was probably the first person to reveal the inherent discrepancy between rhetoric and logic in the early Platonic dialogues, i shall look into the pragmatic implications of philosophical dialogue. and i shall further explore its link to semiotics of culture, a mechanism of which is dialogue. First, i shall venture a historical survey in relation to the present context. aside from its alexandrian legacy, classical scholarship had developed into full-fledged shape from late antiquity to the eleventh century when the first university was founded. it is well known that liberal arts training during this period consisted of two parts: the quadrivium and the trivium. The three branches that constituted the trivium, namely, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, each in its own way, were all related to language. To many of us, that part of educational history seems outdated and quite irrelevant. However, recent years have witnessed renewed interest in medieval trivium as the foundation of modern language philosophy and semiotics. Meanwhile, the revival of rhetoric, first by Chaïm Perelman in the name of nouvelle rhétorique new Rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1971) and more recently, by the american neo-pragmatists, has evoked once again the old debate between rhetoric and logic initiated by Socrates in such dialogues as the Gorgias and the Meno. Undoubtedly, the three branches of language science have their respective functions to perform, and their cognitive and value imports are quite distinct. although the concept of grammar has changed throughout history, in ancient greece, it referred in particular to lexicography and to style, and in our days to the structure of language, irrespective of language s logical status and claim to truth. in contrast, the primary and ultimate concern of logic is truth and the operational procedure in finding truth. Finally, from its birth in Socrates time, rhetoric has always been concerned with the art of persuasion, despite its being reduced to the craft of language embellishments in certain historical moments. There is an important issue in greco-roman rhetoric. When neither party of a philosophical inquiry can claim that s/he has acquired truth, and when truth, especially that which concerns ethical values, cannot be sought through logical procedure, what should the interlocutors do? almost the whole corpus of Platonic dialogues can be said to be dealing with this thorny issue. The etymology of the word dia-logos dialogue suggests that when logos truth is not yet available, when nobody can monopolize logos speech, it has to be carried on across/through (dia) all the speakers involved. The OED gives a very lively example from the English novel Tom Jones (1749): a short dialogue then passed between them. The quotation shows that dialogue is an alternating on-going discursive process, through which some kind of truth may emerge. This pragmatic aspect of language use is so prevalent in our daily life that we practice it all the time without awareness. However, pragmatists and philosophers of language cannot but be fascinated by this common phenomenon, and this explains why the genre has become the focus of critical attention in the twentieth century. We all know that the early dialogues of Plato have Socrates as the leading 20

3 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE interlocutor. More often than not, he is the person who poses the initial question and launches the dialogue into action. a naïve moralistic view would regard Socrates as the spokesman of virtues, but a closer examination will show that the philosopher is as good at using rhetorical strategies as the sophists whom he attacks. Socrates often begins by pretending that he is ignorant, then engages his opponent who is supposed to know well the topic under discussion, and finally, through manipulation of the discrepancy between logic and rhetoric, corners his opponent and forces the latter to admit that he is also ignorant. This is the famous Socratic disavowal of knowledge, and the strategy Socrates uses is the well-known elenchos, meaning cross-examination, questioning, or refutation. The word is still used in modern greek. For instance, the immigration office at a port of entry is called the elenchos. an example i have discussed elsewhere is the exchange between Socrates and Meno in the dialogue The Meno (Chang 2003). Through a series of exchanges with Meno, a disciple of gorgias the sophist, who claimed to know what arête ( excellence, virtue, etc.) is, Socrates, in his characteristic disavowal of knowledge and persistent Q&a, forces Meno to admit that he did not really know or no longer know much about it. What is the elenchos? and what kind of inquiry qualifies as an elenchos? Supposing we accept gregory Vlastos definition of standard elenchos, and using Meno as example, we could recapitulate the debate like this. (1) Meno asserts a thesis of arête, P, which Socrates considers false and targets for refutation. (2) Socrates secures agreement to further premises, say Q and R. The agreement is ad hoc: Socrates argues from {Q, R}, not to them. (3) Socrates then argues, and Meno agrees, that Q & R entail not-p. Socrates then claims that he has shown that not-p is true, P false. Further reading of the dialogue shows Socrates argues from two other propositions Q and R rather than from P, but he manages to make Meno to accept Q and R to be true, and to accept Socrates s conclusion. it can be said that Socrates has violated the rule of relation or relevancy and that of manner (e.g. prolixity) in cooperative principle advanced by Paul grice. The other statements, Q, R, etc. are made by Socrates rather than elicited from Meno s P, and the burden of proof should be shifted to Socrates rather than Meno. Therefore, the fact that one interlocutor s P is inconsistent with the other interlocutor s Q and R does not prove that P is false. One perceives here that Socrates search for truth is both realized and undermined by the dialogic form. The method cannot be monopolized by Socrates, or for that matter the early Socrates. Some eight hundred years later, augustine used the same method of inquiry in his dialogue with his son adeodatus on teaching, entitled De Magistro. augustine manipulates the dialogue in the name of teaching, in a unique discursive situation involving an asymmetrical father/son relation- 21

4 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING ship, where the senior not only takes full advantage of his filial interlocutor, but also lays injunctions on the latter. The Socratic elenchos is precisely the method used by augustine to get the better of his son, but his son may turn the table around by using the same strategy. in the opening chapter of De Magistro, adeodatus firmly adheres to his P, refuses to give in to augustine s Q and R, but he finally accepts not-p because he cannot argue with Christian belief which serves as the basis of augustine s argument. Does augustine win? Yes, he does, in so far as his argument is a priori. Does adeodatus lose? The answer cannot be given because of the double-bind injunctions: you should follow the rules of argument, but you can never argue with Faith. Unlike Socrates s argument with Meno and his teaching or reminding the slave boy in the Meno, which eventually prove useful, augustine fails to reason with adeodatus, but he succeeds through appealing to belief. The initial exchange between augustine and adeodatus, as well as the father s subsequent argumentation by authority, has far-reaching implications. among other things, it shows the social functions of language. To speak is to make a speech act, and is to exercise illocutionary and/or perlocutionary forces in relation to the interlocutor. Furthermore, the effect of that speech act is more than Horatian delectare and movere, but amounts to the higher order of docere. Whilst the effects of moving and delighting are based on the performative use of language, teaching comprises of both the performance of speech act and the making of constative statements. This enables the dialogue to inquire into both the semantic and pragmatic aspects of language. Finally, we should return to the elenchos. Popular as the strategy is in classical rhetoric, the elenchos has little contribution to make to modern argumentation. What is relevant to pragmatics is perhaps the dialogic form in which this method of cross-examination is embedded. The force and limits of the method can be seen only through dialogic interaction. as Socrates s argument shows here and there, it is a method incorporating the operational procedure of logic and the moral persuasion of rhetoric, manipulated to refute and convert his interlocutor. in Plato s Cratylus Socrates defines the dialectician as he who knows how to ask and answer questions (390c). and he has Cratylus say that the methods of inquiry and discovery are of the same nature as instruction (436a). The importance of dialogue in philosophical inquiry cannot be over-estimated. When Socrates uses the expression joined inquiry in the Meno, he is actually referring to the method of Q&a in conversation or more precisely, dialogue. He deliberately plays on words by expanding the link of dianoia and logos to that of dianoia and dialogos (The Sophist 263e), suggesting thereby that thought is psychis dialogos dialogue of the mind (264a). The dialogic and dialectic method as a method of division is most succinctly expressed in The Sophist 253c-d. The etymological and semantic links between dialogue and dialectic are well established in the literature to need any rehearsal here. The basic discursive situation involves two (and more) interlocutors who take turns in making meaningful utterances, to communicate so as to arrive at 22

5 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE a logical conclusion for certain pragmatic purposes. This discursive situation then is appropriated to serve as a model for other forms of more complicated and sophisticated communication. it is often expanded to cover exchange of ideas, views, information on a larger scale, e.g., and the interlocutors are no longer restricted to individual persons, but are replaced by collective entities. in fact, one should say that even in abstraction, the interlocutors are always already embedded in and saturated with ideologies. Thus we have, for example, the dialogue between two cultures. according to Yuri lotman, dialogue is characterized by the discreteness of language and asymmetry in communication. Where the interlocutors alternate in give-and-take, each is capable of articulating only his discrete share of discourse, perhaps only one tiny fraction at a time. The discreteness is constituted not only by moments of articulation, but also by moments of silence because when one locutor speaks and sends information, the other has to remain silent and becomes temporarily an allocutor whose job it is to decode the message s/he receives. Since natural language is by nature unstable and subject to the caprice of temporality, the information flow is often asymmetrical and perfect communication is thus impossible. Since natural language is the primary modelling system, on top of which is the secondary modelling system of culture, the phenomenon of interpreting culture becomes all the more difficult. This is especially the case in cross-cultural communication because each of the two parties involved has its own definition of culture, its own boundaries of the legitimate texts that constitute culture as well as exclude the so-called non-culture. as dialogue of cultures is inevitable in a culture s historical evolution, such dialogue serves, curiously, a special function of its own dialogue or, in lotman s words, auto-communication. lotman projects the dialogic discreteness onto the history of a culture, where the interlocutors cease to be the indigenous versus the exogenous, because both have already been fused as historical products, but are displaced by two historical moments which engage each other in dialogue, or are charged with the semiotic task of infinite process of encoding and decoding. an example is the dialogue between a turbulent, productive moment and its relatively calm and inert-looking but fully saturated counterpart. in this sense, the auto-communication of a culture which is no longer a self-sufficient entity in itself amounts to the perennial gadamarian self-dialogue that characterizes cultural hermeneutics. This is perhaps an alternative solution to the thorny problem of cross-cultural dialogue with which we are all concerned. References Chang, Han-liang (2003). The paradox of learning and the elenchos: Plato s Meno, augustine s De Magistro, and gongsunlong s Jianbailun. in Comparative Literature in the Cross-cultural Context, aimin Cheng and lixin Yang (eds.), nanjing: Yilin Press. Chang, Han-liang (2007). Persuasion in the Pre-Qin China. in Traditions of 23

6 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING Controversy. Marcelo Dascal and Han-liang Chang (eds.), amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. lotman, Yuri M. (2001). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. ann Shukman (trans.). london: i. B. Tauris. Perelman, Chaïm and lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, (1971 [1969]). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weave (trans.). notre Dame: University of notre Dame Press. Vlastos, gregory (1996 [1983]). The Socratic elenchus. in Socrates: Critical Assessments, Prior, William J. Prior (ed.) 4 vols. 3: 28-55, london and new York: Routledge. 24

7 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE Icon, Index, Symbol, Alterity! FlOYD MERREll This title reminds one of a title once created by Tom Sebeok (1983). Here, it draws from an article by augusto Ponzio. let s listen to him: The symbolic universe is not stable, uniform and monolithic. it is made of deviations, differences, deferments and renvois, displacements and transformations. in other words, we need to explain in what way alterity is able to infiltrate the very sphere of the symbolic (2005: 158). Does alterity infiltrate the symbolic? Yes, because the symbolic is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. But it infiltrates more than the symbolic, because iconicity, on becoming meaningful for some semiotic agent, takes on some premonition of alterity, and because indexicality, when recognized as such by its very nature, takes on a healthy dose of alterity: both iconicity and indexicality are also always becoming something other than what they were becoming. They, along with symbols, are process; they are never stable, uniform and monolithic. 1 augusto merits an enthusiastic applause, and his assertion provokes creation of an amendment involving iconicity and indexicality which i ll try to present for your consideration. augusto is thoroughly Bakhtinian and indelibly Peircean, in addition to his affinities with other masters of the sign. His thrust is thus a logicist, dialogicist and cognitivist in orientation. To say logic is for Peirce to say semiotic ; to say dialogic puts the utterer within the universe of signs; and logic ( semiotic ) and dialogic are a matter of cognition in the broadest sense. augusto is aware that Peirce never gave up his search for a logic in the broadest possible sense, a logic fit for all seasons and all possible styles of reasoning. Obviously such a logic would go against the grain of classical aristotle-based bivalent logic, at least insofar as it had been developed in Peirce s time. One might expect that such a broadest possible logic would follow the lines of triadic logic, which Peirce occasionally tinkered with. But it must be more. it must be, as Peirce himself occasionally put it, vague, perhaps offering a foreshadowing of modal logic, many valued logic, and fuzzy logic. Peirce never quite made good on his promise to give us this logic. But he left suggestions here and there. He pointed out that a proposition asserting presumed actual objects, acts or happenings in a particular version of the world lies at a sort of half-way house between assertions of possibility and probability, or likelihood. While assertions regarding actuals follow the tenets 1 i should hasten to add that elsewhere, augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli (2007) suggest that the interpreted icon and index are also of the nature of alterity (see also Ponzio and Petrilli 2005). 25

8 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING of classical logic, assertions of possibility and probability do not, not necessarily, that is. in Peirce s words, what characterizes possibility is emancipation from the Principle of [non]contradiction, while it remains subject to the Principle of Excluded Third ; what characterizes probability, or likelihood, is that it remains subject to the Principle of [non]contradiction, but throws off the yoke of the Principle of Excluded Third; what characterizes actuality, or what presumably is, is that it acknowledges allegiance to both Principles, and is midway between the two (MS 678: 34-35). What can we make of this? it is common knowledge that classical bivalent logic basically sports three principles: Identity (what is, is what it is), Non-Contradiction (what is, cannot at the same time be other than what it is), and Excluded-Middle (at a particular time and place, there can be no more than what is and what is not). There s no room for a logic of change here, nor a logic immersed in time. Peirce opts for a form of logic operating in concert with time and change. according to his way of thinking, actuality is what we take it for according to our world version and our conventions. Thus actuality is quite comfortable with classical logic. Possibility is what is not, not yet at least. it is something that within some particular timespace context might enter into the process of becoming actual. and probability offers the implication that what will be, can never be specified in the absolute sense. Why? Because there s always the possibility that what will be might occur within some hitherto unknown timespace context that alters some aspect or the whole of the currently presumed world version. 2 This nature of probability bears witness to the notion that what is, is neither fixed nor final, neither stable, uniform, nor monolithic, for everything, in time, is changing. So far, so good. But there is more, when considering classical logical principles alongside the nimble flow of semiosis. augusto also tells us that identity involves alterity, so identity is not at all fixed and definitive (2005: 160). This is to say, i would take it, that, in time, what was the presumed self-identical nature of a sign ( Earth as the center of the Universe) was always in the process of becoming something other (some alter-native alterity) ( Earth as other than the center of the Universe ). Which is to say that along with Earth s displacement and transformation, so also with Sun, Universe, other celestial bodies, and with them, humans, and to a greater or lesser degree the signs humans make and take as if they were the imperious, preordained creators of signs and their self-identical, self-contained, self-sufficient identities. But humans are finite, fallible signs along with all other signs. if time-bound logic there may be, the non-contradiction Principle cannot sufficiently account for the semiosic process. and another bend in the stream opens us up to slippery, elusive vagueness regarding the Excluded-Middle Principle and its inability effectively to pattern 2 For use of the terms timespace context world version, interdependent, interrelated and interactive, as well as the symbols and Ψ appearing in the following paragraph, see merrell (2009, 2010). 26

9 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE semiosis. Earth as an image is iconic. When interdependently, interrelatedly interacting with that massive more-or-less spherical object we call Earth, it is indexical. and when mediatingly endowed with the label Earth, it is symbolic. But the image is not acknowledged as such unless there is alterity, which includes the object with which the image interrelates. and the object is no object unless interdependently, interrelatedly interacting with other objects, its respective image and other images, and its mediating counterpart, a symbol, in interdependent, interrelating interactivity with other symbols, other objects and other images. i would suggest, once again, that there is no stability, uniformity, nor is there self-identity, self-containment, or self-sufficiency, regarding semiosis, human interpreters included as signs becoming signs along with the entire universe of signs. Well, then, how is it possible to account for semiosis. Baldly put, it can t be accounted for, that is, by the use of fixed, embedded in concrete, symbolic signs; and it can be no more than feebly and fallibly accounted for through vague iconic allusions and stuttering indexicals interrelating with fleetingly fashioned objects in the process of their coming-and-going. nevertheless, i ll make an earnest college try at giving it some account, with augusto s aid, of course. augusto writes that there is a relation of reciprocal alterity which implies that the sign and interpretant are not to be viewed within a monologic framework: their rapport is dialogic (2005: 163). This relation which i would suggest is an interrelation within the interrelativity of all signs involves the coming-and-going of signs: process. Process is by no means something from nothing. it arises dialogically augusto would be prone to write from the fountainhead of all signs becoming other signs ( Earth as center Sun as center Einsteinian frames of reference as center n) (where depicts the nonlinear multiple possible branching of signs). The process is like Zero, that non-sign, with neither positive nor negative value, which, in its original interpretation, gives rise to an infinity of negative signs to the left and an infinity of positive signs to the right. in this manner, the possibility of a sign arises, as if a solitary point in empty space (0 ). The point, or image as it were, becomes a positivity (Firstness) that embraces alterity (Secondness), a negativity ( + -). Then it becomes mediated by the interdependent, interrelated interacting of Thirdness ( Ψ). and: Signness! This is commensurable, i would suggest, with augusto s reciprocal alterity. Metaphorically akin to the action of a reciprocating saw pushing against a tree limb, it begins as 0. Then with a push of the button there is +/-/+/-/+/-/+/-/ n. Through mediation on the part of the semiotic agent pressing down on the saw now here, now there, and back again, and angling somewhat more to the left, now to the right, and so on, signs are born. and the limb falls to the ground, interpreted according to the interpreter s original hopes, Ψ Signness!. This Signness doesn t merely come out of the blue. it is accompanied by the becoming of all signs from the semiosic fountainhead. in another way of putting it, semiosis is a matter of alterity-becoming, which is essential to the 27

10 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING constitution of subjective identity, implicit and virtual in the sign (Ponzio 2005: ). augusto goes on, interrelating this process with abduction, induction, and deduction. abduction involves a possible sign, its possible positivity and negativity, and its possible mediation, which brings about an actual sign ready and waiting for its processing in co-participation with some semiotic agent in terms of hypothetical-deductive inference and inductive experience. in other words, augusto s subjective identity pours out into altering and always temporally flowing sign processing, which is always in the process of becoming something other than what it was becoming. and that becoming? it is from the semiosic fountainhead, via the middle way between distinct and often contradictory alternatives, via the included-middle, rather than the bivalent Excluded-Middle of classical logic: thus the source of novelty, otherness, alterity. as augusto puts it: in the function that Peirce assigns to the image, and that is, to the iconic dimension of the symbol, we find instead a new conception rather than being confirmation and repetition, a moment of encounter and recognition, the image is déplacement, an opening towards alterity, the beginning of a voyage in which the return chez soi is not guaranteed (Ponzio 2005: ). as a matter of process, there is never any return (linear, bivalent, reiteration) at all, but rather, myriad differences that make a difference (nonlinear, nonbivalent, coalescence, ongoing creativity). Thanks, augusto, for the thoughtful, stimulating prompts. References merrell, floyd (2009). Sign, Mind, Time, Space: Contradictory Complementary Coalescence. Semiotica 177 (1), merrell, floyd (2010). Entangling Forms: Within Living Processes. Berlin: Mouton de gruyter. Peirce, Charles Sanders. MS, The Charles S. Peirce Papers. Unpublished manuscripts at the Houghton library, Harvard University, available in the Peirce Microfilm edition. Ponzio, augusto (2005). Dialogic gradation in the logic of interpretation: Deduction, induction, abduction. Semiotica 153(1/4), Ponzio, augusto and Susan Petrilli (2007). Semiotics Today. From global Semiotics to Semioethics. Signs 1, Ponzio, augusto and Susan Petrilli (2005). Semiotics Unbounded. Interpretive Routes through the Open Network of Signs. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Rosenthal, Sandra B. (1994). Charles Peirce s Pragmatic Pluralism. albany: State University of new York Press. Sebeok, Tomas a. (1983). One, Two, Three Spells Uberty. in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Umberto Eco and Thomas a. Sebeok (eds.), Bloomington: indiana University Peirce. 28

11 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE Iconicity and intersemiotic translation JOaO QUEiROZ & DaniElla aguiar With reference to Charles S. Peirce s general theory of signs, in particular his triad icon, index, and Symbol, if a translation is to be successful in terms of creativity and interpretation, the relation between the text object of translation and the translatant text must be dominated by iconicity. (Petrilli & Ponzio 2010) The idea of translation as a predominantly iconic process has being developed by Ponzio and Petrilli (2010), and other authors (see gorlée 2005, 1994: 10; Plaza 1987). We have approached the same idea with focus on the phenomenon of intersemiotic translation (it), especially from poetry (and prose) to dance (see aguiar and Queiroz 2011a, 2011b, 2010, 2009). it is well known Jakobson s thesis that, in poetry, verbal equations constitutes a primary organizing principle the constituents (syntactic and morphological categories, the roots, the phonemes and distinctive marks) are confronted and juxtaposed, placed in contiguity relationships according to the similarity and contrast principle (Jakobson 1980: 84). The grammar of the poetry requires from the translator a detailed recreation program of parallelisms between several levels of description of the source-sign (e.g. phonological, syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic). among grammatical categories utilized for parallelisms and contrasts we actually find all the parts of speech, both mutable and immutable: numbers, genders, cases, grades, tenses, aspects, moods, voices, classes of abstract and concrete words, animates and inanimates, appellatives and proper names, affirmatives and negatives, finite and infinite verbal forms, definite and indefinite pronouns or articles, and diverse syntactic elements and constructions (Jakobson 1980: 84). The Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos (1997, 1992) has also defined creative translation as an iconic (isomorphic or paramorphic) recreation of verbal equations an isomorph translation would be, by definition, an iconic translation (Campos 1997: 52). The translation recreates a multi-level system of relations (see Figure 1), an operation that can be described as typically iconic and diagrammatic. according to this perspective, translation is an iconic calculation performed to reveal a multi-level system of relations. 1. Icon and diagrams The icon is a type of sign inextricably linked to its object, an analogue of its own composition, formal, structural, and/or material nature. it stands for its object through its form, structure or material constitution. We know, at least since Charles Morris (Morris 1971), that the aesthetic sign is predominantly 29

12 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING Figure 1. Translation can be modeled as the recreation of a multi-level system of relations. The figure depicts two types of relations: (i) the hypothetical constraints between different levels in sign-source (X, Y, Z) and sign-target (X, Y, Z ), and (ii) an iconic mapping between the descriptive levels from the source-sign into the target-sign. iconic (see also Zeman 1977: ). But the idea of iconicity, central to Ponzio & Petrilli s thesis, and strongly associated by Haroldo de Campos to the concept of creative translation, can be developed in new directions. When an operational criterion is adopted (see Hookway 2000; Stjernfelt 2011), the icon is defined as anything whose manipulation can reveal more information about your object, and algebra, syntax, graphs, and formalization of all types should be recognized as icons. according to Hookway (2000: 102): The key of iconicity is not perceived resemblance between the sign and what it signifies but rather the possibility of making new discoveries about the object of a sign through observing features of the sign itself. Thus a mathematical model of a physical system is an iconic representation because its use provides new information about the physical system. This is the distinctive feature and value of iconic representation: a sign resembles its object if, and only if, study of the sign can yield new information about the object. if an icon can be characterized as a sign that reveals information through a procedure followed by observation, as soon as an icon is considered as consisting of interrelated parts, and since these relations are subject to experimental modifications regulated by rules, we are working with diagrams (see Stjernfelt 2007). Diagram is prototypically described as the manipulation of a geometric structure for the observation of a theorem. But Peirce did not restrict this notion to mathematical entities, visual or graphical representations (see Pharies 1985). We have focused our attention on the phenomenon of it where the process of recreation can be described as a diagrammatic experiment performed to reveal a multi-level system of relations. 2. Diagrams in intersemiotic translation Jakobson asserts that it or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs 30

13 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems (Jakobson 2000: 114). We have assumed a broader sense of this notion including several sign systems and processes (see also gorlée 2005, Plaza 1987). 1 Our model suggests a putative relationship between source and target multi-level systems of relations. But it is possible that an adequate description of the relations between radically different sign systems should be based on an analysis case-by-case, not permitting direct generalization. anyway, an important methodological issue in it (e.g., prose > dance) is the difficulty to establish a mapping between the source and target descriptive levels. (in general, this is not characteristic of interlinguistic translation.) Since the source and target are distinct sign systems, what is more clearly recreated is the system of relations (Figure 2): Figure 2. The figure depicts two types of relations: (i) hypothetical relations between different levels in sign-source (X, Y, Z) and sign-target (R, P, T), and (ii) an iconic mapping between the descriptive levels from the source-system into the target-system. 3. Some consequences according to the perspective introduced here, it recreates a multi-level system of relations. The source is diagrammatically revealed as an analogous multi-level system of relations, an operation we can call iconic calculation. We hope the general ideas outlined here can support an epistemology of translation, with consequences in a research agenda that should be carefully detailed, and exhaustively exemplified. ideally, the results should be compared to different forms of creative reasoning, and abductive inference, concerning diagrammatic operations in several areas (e.g., music, logic, mathematics, etc.). indeed, the status assigned to the task of translation as a creative criticism is based here on another fundamental notion, which may lead us to yet unexplored consequences. if it corresponds to the recreation of an icon of 1. Diverse fields of research have been interested in this kind of phenomenon involving different arts and media. Some scholars of intermediality Studies called the phenomenon intersemiotic transposition (Clüver, 1989) or medial transposition (Rajewsk, 2005). 31

14 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING relations, in terms of analogous salient structures and qualities, it guides us in a radical form of reading and criticism. References aguiar, Daniella and Joao Queiroz (2009). Towards a model of intersemiotic translation. International Journal of the Arts in Society (4): aguiar, Daniella and Joao Queiroz (2010). Modeling intersemiotic Translation: notes Toward a Peircean approach. AS/SA 9(24): 68-81, as-sa/assa-no24/article6en.htm (acessed 02 January 2012). aguiar, Daniella and Joao Queiroz (2011a). Hypoicons in intersemiotic translation. Paper presented at the Eighth international Symposium on iconicity in language and literature, linnaeus University, June. aguiar, Daniella and Joao Queiroz (2011b). The Dance of gertrude Stein: images, Diagrams, and Metaphors in intersemiotic Translation. Paper presented at the Sixth international Conference on the arts in Society, Berlin-Brandenburg academy of Sciences and Humanities, 9-11 May. Campos, Haroldo de (1992). Da tradução como criação e como crítica. in Metalinguagem e outras metas: ensaios de teoria e crítica literária, Haroldo de Campos (ed.), São Paulo: Perspectiva. Campos, Haroldo de (1997). O Arco-íris Branco. São Paulo: imago. Clüver, Claus (1989). On intersemiotic Transposition. Poetics Today 10 (1): gorlée, Dinda l. (1994). Semiotics and the Problem of Translation, With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce. amsterdam and atlanta: Rodopi. gorlée, Dinda l. (2005). Singing on the breath of god. in Song and Significance: Virtues and Vices of Vocal Translation, Dinda l. gorlée (ed.), amsterdam and new York: Rodopi. Hookway, Christopher (2000). Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jakobson, Roman (1980). Poetry of grammar and grammar of Poetry: (Excerpts). Poetics Today 2 (1a): Jakobson, Roman (2000). On linguistic aspects of Translation. in The Translation Studies Reader, lawrence Venuti (ed.), london & new York: Routledge. Morris, Charles. W. (1971). Writings on the General Theory of Signs. The Hague: Mouton. Petrilli Susan and augusto Ponzio (2010). iconic Features of Translation. AS/SA 9(24): 32-53, (acessed 02 January 2012). Pharies, David a. (1985). Charles S. Peirce and the Linguistic Sign. amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publihing Company. Plaza, Julio (1987). Tradução Intersemiótica. São Paulo: Perspectiva. Rajewsk, irina O. (2005) intermediality, intertextuality, and Remediation: a literary Perspective on intermediality. Intermédialités/Intermedialities 6: Stjernfelt, Frederik. (2007). Diagrammatology: an investigation on the borderlines of phenomenology, ontology and semiotics. new York: Springer. Stjernfelt, Frederik. (2011). On operational and optimal iconicity in Peirce s diagrammatology. Semiotica 186: Zeman, Jay. (1977). The esthetic sign in Peirce s semiotic. Semiotica 19(3/4):

15 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE Translation as listening or wanting to hear annick CHaPDElainE Listening is understood as opening towards the other; instead, wanting to hear as englobing the other. Wanting to hear the other implies silence; listening does not imply silence or muteness, but what (with a quasi neologism) we may call taciturnity, that is, irony, indirect discourse, responsive understanding, and openness to the other. Translation always implies encounter not only among different languages but also among different cultures, and can be oriented as listening or as wanting to hear. (Ponzio 2006: ) The hypertext is a reading-text in a strong sense, in other words, it privileges the reader insofar as it allows him to choose from different reading trajectories. (Ponzio 2007: 290) Each generation, upon feeling the impulse to translate or retranslate a specific hypertext 1, is unconsciously faced with a choice between listening or wanting to hear. an interesting illustration of this issue is the case of Faulkner s migrations into French. When Faulkner was first translated in France, he was hailed as tragic author by his prominent preface writers (Malraux, Sanctuaire 1933, larbaud, Tandis que j agonise 1934) and critics (Sartre 1938, 1939), one of whom was also his renowned translator (Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, 1931, Lumière d août 1935, Le Bruit et la fureur 1938). This tragic reputation remained frozen under the strong effect of the primeval translation project shaped by the conservative French literary and translative horizon of the dark thirties, which only legitimized serious and proper writing in literary prose. 2 From then on, the great majority of French readers of Faulkner s translations were led to believe that he was solely a genius of tragic art. The acclimatory effects of Faulkner s reception in France occurred on at least three levels: a psychological tragic aura which cast a pall on his work, a cultural or intersemiotic deafness to his translatability, and the sole use of a target historical-natural language for translation, demonstrating a linguistic or interlingual refusal to adjust to his daring mode of writing. Sixty years later, a research group in Québec, the greti, 3 decided to choose different reading trajectories by retranslating The 1 The terms in italics emanate from the pioneering works of augusto Ponzio. 2 See Jean-Paul Sartre: discussion on language of the bourgeoisie in Situation of the Writer in 1947 (1949: ); Pierre Bourdieu: concept of legitimate language in Language and Symbolic Power (1991); antoine Berman: criticism of cultivated language in Translation and the Trials of the Foreign (2000: 286), and analysis of the translation horizon of the 1960s in Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne (2009). 33

16 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING Hamlet (2001, 2007), having observed that this Faulkner novel had particularly suffered from the preponderant tragic first reading of his opus. a non-linear reading-writing of this particular novel led the group to discover a series of comic tall tales told by a storyteller, the itinerant sewing-machine agent Ratliff, who retails the feats of individualistic, selfreliant backwoodsmen as well as one of the main themes, that of the tricked trickster, especially in episodes involving barter. The adventures are usually told with a straight face and spoken in more or less thick regional dialect. Read as a variety of fables on the cunning schemes devised by rural characters, associative logic brought to mind fabliaux and fables which also pertain to the French literary heritage, and thus made the group wonder as to why they had not been perceived as such by French readers. as regards the written effects in the narration, also pervaded with humor, the hypertext revealed that it was in line with the European tradition of parody whereby literary prose effects a parodic destruction of preceding novelistic worlds (Bakhtin 1981: 309) as in the works of Cervantes, Mendoza, grimmelshausen, Rabelais, and lesage. indeed, The Hamlet parodies a number of genres in its ironic treatment of biblical, mythical, pastoral and epic themes which interplay to both tragic and comic ends. The comic resides in this very intertwinement which is thematic as well as linguistic, for rendered in Faulknerese, which is as far from any spoken English as Elizabethan blank verse, and which develops in the reader s consciousness an unmistakable sense of a voice (Swink 1972: ). The greti thus sought to convey this pervasive oral and tongue-in-cheek quality by restoring the diversity of voices in Faulkner s written page, their modulations, their interplay, their rhetorical flourishes, and especially their abrupt shifts which operate on a humoristic mode. a remarkable instance of the meshing of what the group identified as oratorical style can be found at the very beginning of the novel wherein the narrator presents his main protagonists as it were in a biblical genealogy and where he shifts without transition and in the very same sentence from a description to direct colloquial discourse, and returns, in the next sentence, to a description followed by indirect discourse: Will Varner, the present owner of the Old Frenchman place, was the chief man of the country. He was the largest landholder and beat supervisor in one county and Justice of the peace in the next and election commissioner in both, and hence the fountainhead if not of law at least of advice and suggestion to a countryside which would have repudiated the term constituency if they had even heard it, which came to him, not in the attitude of What must I do but What do you think you think you would like for me to do if you was able to make me do it. He was a farmer, a usurer, a veterinarian; Judge Benbow of Jefferson once said of him that a milder mannered man never bled a mule or stuffed a ballot box. (Faulkner 1990: 732) 3 Mcgill University Research group in Translatology (known by its French acronym, greti-groupe de recherche en traductologie). 34

17 COMMUNICATION, INTERPRETATION, TRANSLATION, AND CRITIQUE The greti found that The Hamlet unfolds in a universe of discourse whereby both the dialogues i.e. direct discourse, indirect discourse, free indirect discourse, and monologues and the narration present elements of the colloquial and the literary, the oral and the written, delving in both comic popular culture and serious culture. in determining the presence of humor and colloquial speech in the materiality of the text, the greti realized that since Faulkner s opus is related to a number of comic literary traditions all well known to the French public, namely Rabelais and lesage, it was not even necessary to cross a linguisticcultural frontier to seize the lively comic parody in Faulkner s writing. Thus a semiosic process of inter-relating and inter-translating (Welby 1983: 150) was called for in order to restore Faulkner s realia. To depict Le hameau as a sordid rural narrative on the back cover of its first French translation (1959) confirmed that not even the elements of comic and parodic literary traditions which also pertain to the French literary heritage had been listened to or read or in fact heard by the French critique. This kind of deafness can be accounted for in the findings of semioethics in translation, notably in the difference established between listening and wanting to hear as explained by augusto Ponzio: Listening is understood as opening towards the other; instead, wanting to hear as englobing the other. Wanting to hear the other implies silence; listening does not imply silence or muteness, but what (with a quasi neologism) we may call taciturnity, that is, irony, indirect discourse, responsive understanding, and openness to the other. Translation always implies encounter not only among different languages but also among different cultures, and can be oriented as listening or as wanting to hear. (Ponzio 2006: ) it can be stated that, instead of listening to the Faulkner source text, its French interpreters were prey to wanting to hear and pigeonhole it in a preestablished category. This confirms that each period, depending on the historical conjuncture and the relationships between languages, is visible in its translations as well as in its original works. indeed, if one looks at the outstanding French works of the period written by the first eminent Faulkner critics, La condition humaine (1933) by Malraux and La Nausée (1938) by Sartre, one cannot but understand that the inscription of the tragic in his French translations was inevitable, too engrossed as they were in their own works and their own historical preoccupations to be able to distance themselves from those of Faulkner. Endeavoring to retranslate The Hamlet was thus fully justified by the fact that this particular novel is hardly known by the French readership for all the reasons previously mentioned and that on the linguistic level its language is so stripped of all originality, so levelled and standardized into proper French that it has gone from an innovative comic novel in English to a dull rural shapeless account in French. The project thus had The Hamlet as a starting point in view 35

18 WRITING, VOICE, UNDERTAKING of a future retranslation of the opus of the famous american writer. in answer to a possible accusation of appropriating Faulkner by imposing its interpretation of his work, the greti responded by explaining that it translated its own reading of the american writer, conscious that as a group of interpreters it had identified its own interpretants, and that translating is a type of reading which allows for an infinity of interpretations that often disrupt the linguistic habits of the target language which has not yet learnt to greet certain modes of writing and thinking present in the source language. aligned with Bakhtin, the group was aware that: Semantic phenomena can exist in concealed form, potentially, and be revealed only in semantic cultural contexts of subsequent epochs that are favorable for such disclosure (1986: 4). in other words it was possible in the Québec of the 1990s to disclose what was impossible in the France of the 1930s. i would like to thank il mio amico Professoresso Ponzio for giving me countless and wonderful times of musement. References Bakhtin, Mikhaïl (1981 [1975]). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist (ed.), Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.). austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhaïl (1986 [1979]). Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff. in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.), Vern W. Mcgee (trans). austin: University of Texas Press. Berman, antoine (2000 [1985]). Translation and the Trials of the Foreign. in The Translation Studies Reader, lawrence Venuti (ed. and trans.), london and new York: Routledge. Berman, antoine (2009 [1995]). Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne. Françoise Massardier-kenney (ed. and trans.). kent: kent University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1991 [1982]). Language and Symbolic Power. John B. Thompson (ed.), gino Raymond and Matthew adamson (trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Coindreau, Maurice-Edgar (1971 [1931]). William Faulkner. in The Time of William Faulkner, george McMillan Reeves (trans.), Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Coindreau, Maurice-Edgar (1971 [1935]). Preface to Light in August. in The Time of William Faulkner, george McMillan Reeves (trans.), Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Coindreau, Maurice-Edgar (1971 [1938]). Preface to The Sound and the Fury. in The Time of William Faulkner, george McMillan Reeves (trans.), Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Faulkner, William (1990 [1940]). The Hamlet, in Novels Joseph Blotner and noel Polk (eds.). new York: The library of america. Faulkner, William (1959). Le hameau. René Hilleret (trans.). Paris: gallimard, Du monde entier. greti Chapdelaine, annick, Corinne Durin, Christiane Mayer, Bernard Vidal, lucie Joubert, Sophie Boivin, and Peter Di Maso (2001). Retraduction du Hamlet de 36