Rhuthmos

Émile Benveniste and the Notion of Rhythm

Pascal Michon — 2021-02-08T16:00:00Z

Sommaire

It is time now to introduce the revolutionary work of Émile Benveniste (1902-1976), which is largely underestimated nowadays, especially in English speaking countries. Benveniste was of the same generation as Lefebvre, he crossed his path several times but he does not seem to have been politically engaged, although his sympathies seem clearly to have been towards the left. [1] After having excelled in Iranian micro-comparativism, Benveniste embarked in the 1930s in Indo-European macro-comparativism and, parallel to that, on a vast reflection on general linguistics. [2] He taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1927 to 1969 and, like Foucault and Barthes, at the Collège de France, from 1937 until 1969, when he suffered a stroke and had to retire.

His contribution is crucial for us at least for two reasons. First of all, we owe him the rediscovery of the Ancient concept of rhuthmos and the clarification of its difference with what the Moderns call “rhythm,” but he also developed a theory of language which discreetly but resolutely broke with structuralism and opened an entirely new path for anthropology. With Benveniste, the whole question of rhythm was transformed in a way which both involved a broad critique of Platonism and motivated a revolutionary conception of language, thought precisely as a rhuthmic activity in which man can access subjectivity.

Unfortunately, as we will see, very few members of the Rhythmic Constellation properly recognized the importance of his work, and Benveniste has since been regularly regarded as a mere technician in comparative linguistics or a eulogist of an outdated Saussurian linguistics. Although many of his other books would be worth citing [3], I will concentrate here on the two volumes of his Problèmes de linguistique générale – Problems in General Linguistics published in 1966 and 1974 [4].

The Rediscovery of the Notion of Rhuthmos

Strikingly, Benveniste started his famous article on “The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression” [5] (1966/1971, pp. 281-288) by noting the importance rhythm had acquired as a tool for human sciences, since the middle of the 19^th century and especially in the first half of the 20^th century. During the last two decades, an extensive work has been carried out that has documented in detail this expansion and its philosophical bases. We now know better what he was referring to and, probably, aiming at (see Rabinbach, 1990; Golston, 1996, 2008; Baxmann & Gruss, 2009; Hanse, 2010; Michon, 2016, 2018b). But, Benveniste probably also stressed here the importance of rhythm to characterize and distinguish “human behavior,” that is to say, its anthropological dimension as opposed to any naturalistic reduction to the so-called “natural rhythms” which are only projections, “into things and events,” of human-made rhythms (Bourassa, 1992).

The notion of “rhythm” is one of the ideas that affect a large portion of human activities. Perhaps it even serves to distinguish types of human behavior, individual and collective, inasmuch as we are aware of durations and the repetitions that govern them, and also when, beyond the human sphere, we project a rhythm into things and events. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 281)

Benveniste thus proposed to go back to the Greek origin of this notion, which had become, he emphasized, the condition in “modern Western thought” of “this vast unification of man and nature through a consideration of ‘time,' intervals and similar returns” (p. 327). Although Benveniste did not elaborate further his argument, these very few words accurately emphasized the naturalization of man that was presupposed by the recent expansion of the theme of rhythm.

In its oldest known uses, the word rhythm ῥυθμός – rhuthmós (or ῥυσμός [rhusmós] in Ionian) did not have the sense of binary measure of movement, of principle of cadenced and proportioned movement, which it has today. Never, in particular, was it used, as it has been often argued since the Belgian linguist Emile Boisacq (1865-1945), for the movement of waves. This interpretation was a clear case of imaginary projection by which “Man” thought to retrieve in Nature something that he himself had put there. The term came obviously from ῥεῖν [rhein] – to flow, however “the sea does not flow,” Benveniste remarked bluntly (p. 328). “This whole interpretation rests on the wrong premises.” In fact, the term did not “even mean ‘rhythm,'” in the modern sense.

There is a contradiction of meaning between ῥεῖν and ῥυθμός, and we cannot extricate ourselves from the difficulty by imagining—and this is a pure invention—that ῥυθμός could have described the movement of the waves. What is more, ῥυθμός in its most ancient uses never refers to flowing water, and it does not even mean “rhythm.” This whole interpretation rests on the wrong premises. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 282)

The word ῥυθμός – rhuthmós was commonly used “as early as the 7^th century” (p. 330) and until the 4^th century in Greek lyric and tragic poetry, as well as in prose. Then it became a technical term with the ancient Ionian philosophers, especially the creators of atomism, Leucippus (5^th cent. BC) and Democritus (ca. 460-ca. 370 BC).

It is in the vocabulary of the ancient Ionian philosophy that we may apprehend the specific value [valeur] of ῥυθμός [rhuthmós], and most particularly among the creators of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus. These philosophers made ῥυθμός, (ῥυσμός [rhusmós]), into a technical term, one of the key words of their teaching. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 282)

In atomism, ῥυθμός – rhuthmós meant “form” understood “as the distinctive form, the characteristic arrangement of the parts in a whole.”

There is no variation, no ambiguity in the meaning that Democritus assigns to ῥυθμός, and this is always “form,” understood as the distinctive form, the characteristic arrangement of the parts in a whole. This point being established, there is no difficulty in confirming it by the total number of ancient examples. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 283)

From all its identified uses, Benveniste concluded that ῥυθμός – rhuthmós meant, with no exception, “distinctive form, proportioned figure, arrangement, disposition.” Related verbs as ῥυσμῶ, μετα ρρυσμῶ, μετα ρρυσμίζῶ – rhusmô, metarrusmô, metarrusmízô meant identically “to shape” or “to transform, physically or morally sth./sb.”

We must limit ourselves here to this almost exhaustive list of examples. The citations suffice amply to establish: (1) that ῥυθμός never meant “rhythm” from the earliest use down to the Attic period; (2) that it was never applied to the regular movement of the waves: (3) that its constant meaning is “distinctive form, proportioned figure, arrangement, disposition” in conditions of use that are otherwise extremely varied. Similarly the derivatives or compounds, nominal or verbal, of ῥυθμός never refer to anything but the notion of “form.” Such was the exclusive meaning of ῥυθμός in all types of writings down to the period at which we halted our citations [5^th c. BC]. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 285)

However, Benveniste noted that there were in ancient Greek several other terms meaning “form” such as Σχῆμα, μορφή, εἶδος, – Skhêma, morphê, eîdos and that rhuthmós should in some way have differed from them. To show that, he switched from his survey of lexical uses to morphology and etymology, a move that allowed him to introduce a revolutionary idea: the term-ending –(θ)μός/–(th)mόs does not indicate “the accomplishment of the notion, but the particular modality of its accomplishment as it presented to the eyes.”

Having established this meaning, we can and must determine it precisely. There are other expressions in Greek for “form.” Σχῆμα, μορφή, εἶδος, [Skhêma, morphê, eîdos], etc. among which ῥυθμός [rhuthmós] must be distinguished in some way, better than our [first] translation can indicate. The very structure of the word ῥυθμός should be investigated. We can now profitably return to etymology [...] The formation in –(θ)μός [–(th)mόs] deserves attention for the special sense it confers upon “abstract” words. It indicates not the accomplishment of the notion, but the particular modality of its accomplishment as it presented to the eyes. For example, ὄρχησις [όrkhêsis] is the act of dancing, ὀρχηθμός [orkhêthmόs] the particular dance seen as it takes place. [...] στάσις [stásis] is the state of being in some position [le fait de se tenir], σταθμός [stathmόs] the position assumed [la manière de se tenir], whence the balancing of a scale, a stance, etc. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 285)

Critique of the Notion of Metron

In other words—Benveniste did not develop this point but he made it quite obvious—rhuthmós was a concept of form that was completely opposite to Plato's. A rhuthmós was not a “Form,” an “Idea,” an εἶδος – eîdos, but a shape “as it presents to the eyes” of the observer. Far from being outer-worldly, it belonged to the phenomenal world. Moreover, it was not fixed, immobile, and eternal; it had a life of its own. It did not “designate the accomplishment of [the] notion [of form] but the particular modality of its accomplishment.” That is the reason why it was “appropriate for the pattern of a fluid element” and commonly denoted an “improvised, temporary, changeable form.”

When Greek authors render ῥυθμός [rhuthmós] by σχῆμα [skhêma], when we ourselves translate it by “form,” in both cases it is only an approximation. There is a difference between σχῆμα and ῥυθμός: σχῆμα [...] is defined as a fixed form, realized an viewed in some way as an object. On the other hand, ῥυθμός, according to the contexts in which it is given, designates the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving, mobile, fluid, the form of that which does not have organic consistency [:] it fits the pattern [in English] of a fluid element, a letter arbitrarily shaped, of a robe [à un péplos] which one arranges at one's will, of a particular state of character or mood. It is the form as improvised, momentary, changeable. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, pp. 285-286, my mod.)

Benveniste, still without referring directly to Platonic Forms, emphasized the philosophical significance of the term rhuthmós. It actually designated the most common concept of form in the Ionian school, i.e. before Plato imposed his own. In this sense, it still remained a very powerful tool against Idealism.

Now, ῥεῖν [rheîn] is the essential predication of nature and things in the Ionian philosophy since Heraclitus, and Democritus thought that, since everything was produced from atoms, only a different arrangement of them produced the difference of forms and objects. We can now understand how ῥυθμός [rhuthmós], meaning literally “the particular manner of flowing,” could have been the most proper term for describing “dispositions” or “configurations” without fixity or natural necessity and arising from an arrangement which is always subject to change. The choice of a derivative of ῥεῖν [rheîn] for explaining this specific modality of the “form” of things is characteristic of the philosophy which inspired it; it is a representation of the universe in which the particular configurations of moving [du mouvant] are defined as [“flowings.”] [fluements]. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 286, my mod.)

In short, before Plato, ῥυθμός – rhuthmós meant either “a temporary disposition of something flowing,” or more deeply, according to its morphology, “a particular manner of flowing” or “a particular modality of accomplishment of a notion.”

The “modern” sense of rhythm as measure, as binary order of movement, which according to Benveniste is still ours nowadays, emerged, for its part, in the 4^th century BC with Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC), who for the first time has associated the notion of ῥυθμός – rhuthmós, with that of μέτρον – métron in his description of music and dance. The ῥυθμός – rhuthmós, which was until then only an improvised, momentary and modifiable form, or better yet a manner of flowing, was now determined as measure and arithmetically regulated order, in brief as metric.

Here is the new sense of ῥυθμός: in Plato, “arrangement” (the original sense of the word) is constituted by an ordered sequence of slow and rapid movements, just as “harmony” results from the alternation of high and low. And it is the order in movement, the entire process of the harmonious arrangement of bodily attitudes combined with [a meter] [un mètre], which has since been called ῥυθμός. We may then speak of the “rhythm” of a dance, of a step, of a song, of a speech, of work, of everything which presupposes a continuous activity broken by meter into alternative intervals. The notion of rhythm is established. (“The Notion of ‘Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression,” 1951/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 287, my mod.)

Rhuthmos as a New Paradigm for the 21^st Century

The reader will not mind if I reproduce here the conclusion of the first chapter in Volume 1. Thanks to Benveniste we know the followings.

1. The term rhuthmós designated from the 7^th to the 5^th century BC the various temporary forms taken by the ever running Heraclitean world flow—whether conceived as flow of atoms or not—as they present themselves to the eyes of the observer.

2. The atomist philosophers transformed it, for the first time in Western history, into one of the most important tools used to explain nature on a materialist and pre-empiricist ground.

3. Rhuthmós commonly meant “temporary disposition of something flowing,” but also, implicitly, due to its morphology, “particular way of flowing or of accomplishing an action.”

4. It never denoted the order of a time sequence but either an ephemeral form of something due to change, an instantaneous time-stop, or, when it involved a duration, a form that was itself changing during its per-formance.

5. The sub-concepts measure, number, alternation, periodicity, and the idea that a rhuthmós should be known by looking for its essence, its Form, were introduced in the definition of rhythm only by Plato during the first half of the 4^th century.

6. The Platonic conception of rhythm has obfuscated the previous one and made it very difficult to recover.

7. It has largely ruled over Western cultural history up to present and has been responsible for the tremendous success of idealist and sometimes irrational rhythmic views equating man with nature—for a detailed history of this spread see Michon (2018a, 2018b, 2019).

The concept of rhuthmos—which I will transliterate from now on without its original accentuation to suggest that I will not talk about the ancient Greek term but about the question that Ionian philosophers were pointing at while using it—has been of great help, in the previous volumes of this series, in deconstructing the Platonic domination over the history of rhythm, and by identifying, on the other hand, the resurgences and new developments of the non-Platonic perspectives. As a matter of fact, despite its general idealist Platonic undertone, the history of rhythm offers also a bunch of innovative propositions which are still of the greatest interest to us.

Now we can certainly go a step further. As we will see, Benveniste's contribution to the theory of rhuthmos announced, in embryonic form, certain features of the theory of language that he would develop in the 1950s and 1960s. Likewise, the concept of subjectivity involved in this theory of language was entirely consistent with a rhuthmic perspective. Taken together, the two theories set up a revolutionary conception of the radical historicity of human beings.

Benveniste's contribution could, therefore, help us to develop a new paradigm better suited to the needs of the 21^st century. The structural and systemic paradigms, which flourished in the three decades following WW2, receded considerably in the late 1970s, at least in the humanities, and gave way to two new paradigms which then met with great success over the following decades: individual and difference. Now that this second couple faces increasing difficulties which seem to indicate that they have in turn exhausted their potential, perhaps the time has come for the rhythmic or, rather, the rhuthmic paradigm to irrigate science, art and philosophy. Such an achievement will only be possible, however, if we correctly assess Benveniste's position in the rhythmic constellation and if we are able to understand the difficulties his work rapidly encountered after a brief success in 1968 and in the following years.

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[1] In Le Périple structural (2008), Jean-Claude Milner suggests that Benveniste was close, at least for a certain period of time, to a group of young Marxist philosophers acting through the avant-garde literary journal Philosophies (1924-1925) (p. 121-125). In 1925, he signed a famous tract denouncing the French intervention against the Riff Republic in Morocco with Pierre Morhange, Norbert Guterman, Henri Lefebvre, and Georges Politzer. Milner mentions also Georges Friedmann but I could not find his name in the list published in La Révolution surréaliste, 15 octobre 1925, p. 32. However, he notes that, from 1925, Benveniste no longer made any public statements (p. 124).

[2] For an intellectual biography, remarkable in all respects, see Malkiel (1980).

[3] Such as the wonderful Noms d'agent et noms d'action en indo-européen, 1948 and the most remarkable Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 1969 – Indo-European language and society, 1973.

[4] The material of this chapter and the followings was first discussed in a seminar at Le Collège International de Philosophie in Paris in 1996-1997. Part of it has been published in Michon (2010) and (2018a). Apart from Barthes' (1977) and Meschonnic's comments (1982), which will be discussed below in Chapter 8 and in Volume 5, one of the earliest and best introduction to Benveniste's contribution is Bourassa (1992).

[5] The article dated back to 1951 and had been published in the rather notorious Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique edited by the psychologist Ignace Meyerson (1888-1983), without yet attracting much attention.

Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Subjectivity – Part 1

Pascal Michon — 2021-02-08T15:30:00Z

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In our elaboration of the phrase radically historical anthropology, we have insisted, so far, on the terms radically historical. Benveniste helped us to suggest the outlines of a rhuthmic conception of human life independent of most modern philosophical theories. We must now approach the notion of historical anthropology itself. Indeed, at the same time as he was describing the relation between language and society, language and the individual, Benveniste sketched out a rhuthmic theory of subjectivity through the development of the concept of “enunciation apparatus.”

Language as Rhuthmic Basis of Subjectivation

According to Benveniste, subjectivation is first and foremost a language phenomenon—which is itself, it must kept in mind, a universal.

It is in and through language [le langage] that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language [le langage] alone establishes the concept of “ego” in reality, in its reality which is that of the being. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 260)

Whatever the forms in which we usually grasp it (consciousness or feeling of being oneself, subject of experience, memory and will, etc.), subjectivity derives, more or less directly, from the activity of language which constitutes its primary condition. “‘Ego' is he who says ‘ego.'”

The “subjectivity” we are discussing here is the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as “subject.” It is defined not by the feeling which everyone experiences of being himself (this feeling, to the degree that it can be taken note of, is only a reflection) but as the psychic unity that transcends the totality of the actual experiences [des expériences vécues] it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness. Now we hold that that “subjectivity,” whether it is placed in phenomenology or in psychology, as one may wish, is only the emergence in the being of a fundamental property of language [du langage]. “Ego” is he who says “ego.” That is where we see the foundation of “subjectivity,” which is determined by the linguistic status of “person.” (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 260)

Subjectivation does not derive from “the feeling” of being oneself or of having “experiences,” but from “the psychic unity that transcends the totality of the actual experiences it assembles, and that makes the permanence of the consciousness.” So Benveniste implicitly makes here the same reproach to psychologists and phenomenologists as, previously, to sociologists and anthropologists: that of studying a pure abstraction, “man separated from language.” For him the linguistic nature of man makes null and void any study which would be limited to what is experienced by the subject because feeling “is only a reflection,” and the subjectivity only “the emergence in the being a fundamental property of language. “Ego” is he who says ‘ego.'” By these statements, Benveniste underlines the anthropological force of language. He explicitly challenges the ideas traditionally held in this regard in philosophy and psychology. The unity of the subject does not come from the subject itself, whether conceived as a soul, a reflexive entity or simply as experience, but from language in action.

It should be emphasized however that this is not to say that the subjectivity is installed by and through “la langue” as in the innumerable versions of structuralist or poststructuralist thought. La langue is only a construction, too often reified by the grammatical, philological and philosophical studies, concerning language as an activity. For Benveniste, in fact,

nihil est in lingua quod non prius fuerit in oratione – there is nothing in language [la langue] that was not previously in speech. (“The Levels of Linguistic Analysis,” 1962/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 131)

The subject therefore emerges through speech acts which, although they appear similar, are each time entirely new, as we already mentioned.

How do we produce language [la langue ]? We do not reproduce anything. We apparently have a number of models. But every man invents his language [sa langue] and invents it all his life. Now all men invent their own language [leur propre langue] on the spot and each in a distinctive way, and each time in a new way. Saying hello every day of your life to someone is a reinvention every time. All the more so when it comes to sentences. (“Structuralism and Linguistics,” 1968/1974, pp. 18-19, my trans.)

The I as Empty Linguistic Form Filled by the Enunciation

The detailed analysis of this emergence of “ego” in speech activity shows a very fascinating theoretical object: pure extraordinariness constantly emerging from the most banal behavior. In the discourse in which it appears, the I, says Benveniste, does in fact refer neither to a concept (the general class of all subjects), nor to an empirical individual (the particular person who would be its referent).

On the one hand, no I is the realization of a universal and timeless idea that would precede it, because there is no object of thought, no concept, to which its different instances of use can identically refer.

Each instance of use of a noun is referred to a fixed and “objective” notion, capable of remaining potential or of being actualized in a particular object and always identical with the mental image it awakens. But the instances of the use of I do not constitute a class of reference since there is no “object” definable as I to which these instances can refer in identical fashion. (“The Nature of Pronouns,” 1956/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 252)

Two years later.

There is no concept “I” that incorporates all the I's that are uttered at every moment in the mouths of all speakers, in the sense that there is a concept “tree” to which all the individual uses of tree refer. The “I,” then, does not denominate any lexical entity. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 261)

On the other hand, the I is not the name designation of an empirical individual either, for it is identically available to all speakers.

Could it then be said that I refers to a particular individual? If that were the case, a permanent contradiction would be admitted into language, and anarchy into its use. How could the same term refer indifferently to any individual whatsoever and still at the same time identify him in his individuality? (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 261)

The I is therefore neither the sign of an idea, nor the name of a person; neither the proxy of the abstract concept of a series of occurrences, nor the representative of an empirical individual.

Now these pronouns are distinguished from all other designations a language articulates in that they do not refer to a concept or to an individual. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 261)

The reality designated by the I or the you is specific to the discourse in action.

What then is the reality to which I or you refers? It is solely a “reality of discourse,” and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except in terms of “locution,” not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. (“The Nature of Pronouns,” 1956/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 252)

In other words, the I is not a sign. It is not part of the semiotic order and has no “signification.” Quite astonishingly, the I receives its content only from its enunciation. It is therefore filled with a different reference each time it is uttered and “corresponds each time to a unique being.”

Each I has its own reference and corresponds each time to a unique being who is set up as such. (“The Nature of Pronouns,” 1956/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 252)

In 1958, Benveniste insisted on this point. The I is a term which depends on the “instance of discourse” in which it is used and therefore “has only a momentary reference.”

We are in the presence of a class of words, the “personal pronouns,” that escape the status of all the other signs of language. Then, what does I refer to? To something very peculiar which is exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker. It is a term that cannot be identified except in what we have called elsewhere an instance of discourse and that has only a momentary reference. The reality to which it refers is the reality of the discourse. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 261)

In 1965, Benveniste elaborated further his argument. Outside of actual discourse, the pronoun I is only an “empty form.” It “receives its reality and its substance from speech alone.”

Outside of actual discourse, the pronoun is only an empty form, which cannot be attached neither to an object nor to a concept. It receives its reality and its substance from speech alone [du discours seul]. (“Language and Human Experience,” 1965/1974, p. 68, my trans.)

The I is only filled when the speaker “appropriates” the “formal apparatus of language” for himself, through a reference to its instantiation itself. This peculiar process therefore makes it belong to the semantic order and to what Benveniste calls the process of “signifiance.” It is, one might say, an expression of the very historicity of Man.

The individual act of language appropriation [appropriation de la langue] introduces the one who speaks into his speech. This is a constitutive datum of the enunciation. The presence of the speaker in his enunciation means that each instance of the discourse constitutes an internal center of reference. (“The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” 1970/1974, p. 82, my trans.)

The reality to which the I—or the you—refers is therefore not virtual and external, as would be an Idea or a concept which could encompass all the I's which have been expressed in the past, are expressed at any moment in the present and will be expressed in the future, but neither is it external and actual, as that of a singular individual would be. In other words, Benveniste dismisses, at least as for the I is concerned, both the Platonic-scholastic theory of individuation by form and matter, and the classical and objectivist theory of individuation by position in space-time, and replaces them with a historical and anthropological theory of subjectivation linked to the very exercise of language.

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Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Subjectivity – Part 2

Pascal Michon — 2021-02-08T15:00:00Z

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The Emergence of the Subject in the Operation of the Enunciation Apparatus

Now, the I does not function alone. It is part of a larger linguistic system based on speech, which Benveniste describes meticulously and calls “the formal apparatus of enunciation” (1970/1974, p. 79-88).

First, the I belongs to a twofold distinctive system which installs the subject in his social interaction but also establishes the referential use of language. On the one hand, the speaking person is differentiated from other humans by the system of pronouns which opposes “ego” to “you” or, as Benveniste says now, “I” to “you.”

It is first of all the emergence of the person indices (the relation I-you [je-tu]) which occurs only in and by the enunciation: the term I [je] denoting the individual who performs the enunciation, the term you [tu], the individual who is present there as addressee [allocutaire]. (“The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” 1970/1974, p. 82, my trans.)

However, this system also has the more unexpected role of allowing the differentiation of “ego” with respect to the world through the opposition of the couple “ego/you” to “him.” Far, therefore, from the I defining itself in a process of reference which would allow him to exist simply by opposing the world, as in the Cartesian tradition, it is the linguistic pronominal system, to which it belongs, and naturally the activity of speech, which create the conditions for referential practice.

Language provides the linguistic instrument which ensures the dual functioning, subjective and referential, of discourse: it is the essential distinction, always present in any language, in any society or in any time, between the ego and the non-ego [entre le moi et le non-moi], operated by special indices which are constant in the language and which are used only for this use, the forms called in grammar the pronouns, which carry out a double opposition, the opposition of “ego” to “you” [du “moi” à “toi”] and the opposition of the system “ego/you” to “him.” [du système “moi/toi” à “lui”]. (“Structure of Language and Structure of Society,” 1968/1974, p. 99, my trans.)

At the same time, this pronominal system, the very first foundation of subjectivation, is extended by a set of indicators which, far from relating to the existing physical space-time—whose existence naturally is not denied by Benveniste—establish spatiality and temporality for the speaker by taking their own enunciation as a central reference point.

Concerning spatiality, these indicators are the deictics “here/there,” especially the demonstratives “this/that,” “this one/that one,” “these/ those,” etc., which allow to locate “any object in any field, once the one who orders it has designated himself as the center and reference point.”

The personal pronoun is not the only form of this nature. A few other indicators share the same situation, notably the series of deictics. Showing the objects, the demonstratives order the space from a central point, which is Ego [Ego], according to variable categories: the object is near or far from me or from you, it is thus oriented (in front of or behind me, up or down), visible or invisible, known or unknown, etc. The system of spatial coordinates thus lends itself to locating any object in any field, once the one who orders it has designated himself as the center and reference point. (“Language and Human Experience,” 1965/1974, p. 69, my trans.)

Of the same nature and relating to the same structure of enunciation are the numerous indices of ostension (type this, here, etc.), terms which imply a gesture designating the object at the same time as the instance of the term is pronounced. (“The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” 1970/1974, p. 82, my trans.)

As for temporality, these indicators are adverbs such as “now,” “later,” etc., and the “verbal tenses” mobilized in the speech instance. According to Benveniste, it is indeed “through language that the human experience of time is manifested.” Unlike “physical” time (the time of the cosmos) or “chronic” time (the social convention established by the calendar), “the human experience of time” manifests itself “through language,” that is to say, through “the exercise of speech.” And the temporality linked to the exercise of language has the particularity, like its spatiality, of being centered on the “instance of speech.” The present which “coincides with the moment of enunciation” constitutes “its center—a generative and axial center together.”

It is through language [par la langue] that the human experience of time manifests itself, and linguistic time also appears to us irreducible to chronic time and physical time. What is unique about linguistic time is that it is organically linked to the exercise of speech, that it is defined and ordered as a function of speech. This time has its center—a generative and axial center together—in the present of the speech instance [l'instance de parole]. Whenever a speaker uses the grammatical form of “present” (or its equivalent), he situates the event as contemporary in the instance of the discourse [l'instance du discours] that mentions it. (“Language and Human Experience,” 1965/1974, p. 73, my trans.)

A third series of terms pertaining to the enunciation consists of the entire—often vast and complex—paradigm of temporal forms, which are determined in relation to the EGO, the center of the enunciation. Verbal “tenses,” the axial form of which, the “present,” coincides with the moment of enunciation, are part of this necessary apparatus. (“The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” 1970/1974, p. 83, my trans.)

In 1970, Benveniste listed the three main anthropological consequences of the appropriation and operation of the enunciation apparatus by the speaker: express[ing] “his position as speaker,” “implant[ing] the other in front of him,” and “express[ing] a certain relationship to the world.”

As an individual realization, enunciation can be defined, in relation to language [la langue], as a process of appropriation. The speaker appropriates the formal apparatus of the language [l'appareil formel de la langue] and he expresses his position as speaker through specific indices on the one hand, and by means of ancillary procedures on the other. But immediately, as soon as he declares himself a speaker and assumes the language [la langue], he implants the other in front of him, regardless of the degree of presence he attributes to this other. Any statement, whether explicit or implicit, is an address, it postulates an addressee [un allocutaire]. Finally, in the enunciation, language [la langue] is used to express a certain relationship to the world. [... ] The reference is an integral part of the enunciation. (“The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” 1970/1974, p. 82, my trans.)

To conclude on this point, what Benveniste calls the “ego,” that is the general form of human subjectivity “that transcends the totality of the actual experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness” is both diffracted into and produced by the use of a series of various linguistic forms. First, it relies on the use of the pronoun I (or verbal forms when the pronoun is omitted) which simultaneously actualizes and polarizes, each time it is uttered, an apparently simple but actually complex pronominal system organized according to two nested interactive couples (ego/you and ego-you/him). Every time it is actualized, this system concurrently makes the ego emerge and allows the referential process, which traditionally was supposed to reflect the distance separating the subject from the world. Second, the actual use of a series of linguistic indicators, such as the deictics and the verbal tenses, especially present time, allows the subject each time to both locate himself in space and time, and to render any other kind of space and time (physical but also metric and chronic) possible. Naturally, all these characteristics are shared by all human beings. Provided they speak the same language, the access to expressing oneself, implanting the other in front of oneself and expressing a relationship to the world, is available in turn to any of the co-speakers.

As a result, most of the fundamental views of natural science as well as social science and humanities are put into question. The opposition between ego and world, that between ego and society, and those between present and past, as well as between present and future, are taken back to linguistic oppositions organizing the activity of discourse.

The Mobility and Discontinuity of the Subject in the Flow of Language

Benveniste is aware of the strangeness of the conclusions he reaches and of the difficulty he will encounter in getting them to be accepted, so little is known about the language.

The subject has first, for Benveniste, a very particular characteristic. It is neither a pure product of social and cultural relations as sociologists and many 20^th century philosophers would have it, nor a pole of psychological identity which would be the basis of all exchange processes, as psychologist and more ancient philosophers claim, but a condition for both social interactions and psychological identity which implies a tension maintained between them.

As we have seen, it relies both on the existence, in all human languages, of a set of vacant places available for communication and on the actualization of these places achieved through the communication performance. All terms like I, you, the deictics, the present tense and all the forms which are linked to them, are “‘empty' signs, that are nonreferential with respect to ‘reality,'” but that are “always available and become ‘full' as soon as a speaker assumes them in every instance of his speech.” This paradoxical characteristic has, notes Benveniste, a fundamental function: it serves to solve the problem of “intersubjective communication.”

The importance of their function will be measured by the nature of the problem they serve to solve, which is none other than that of intersubjective communication. Language has solved this problem by creating an ensemble of “empty” signs that are nonreferential with respect to “reality.” These signs are always available and become “full” as soon as a speaker introduces them into each instance of his discourse. (“The Nature of Pronouns,” 1956/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 254)

Indeed, if the I would be permanently filled with the idiosyncrasy of each speaker, “there would be as many languages as individuals and communication would become absolutely impossible.”

If each speaker, in order to express the feeling he has of his irreducible subjectivity, made use of a distinct “identifying signal” [un indicatif] (in the sense in which each radio transmitting station has its own “call letters” [son indicatif propre]), there would be as many languages as individuals and communication would become absolutely impossible. Language wards off this danger by instituting a unique but mobile sign, I, which can be assumed by each speaker on the condition that he refers each time only to the instance of his own discourse. (“The Nature of Pronouns,” 1956/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 254)

Another example of this phenomenon is the functioning of reference. Since the speaker posits himself as center in his referring to the world, this could result in a kind referential war, each speaker setting his own center and refusing others'. But “the pragmatic consensus” which “makes each speaker a co-speaker” explains that the others actually “co-refer identically.”

The very condition of this mobilization and appropriation of the language [la langue] is, for the speaker, the need to refer through discourse, and, for the other, the possibility of co-referring identically, in the pragmatic consensus which makes each speaker a co-speaker. (“The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation,” 1970/1974, p. 82, my trans.)

Finally, the same kind of paradoxical experience occurs with the present tense. On the one hand, “the specific instance from which the present results is each time new,” which could seem to result in making it “impossible to transmit.”

The act of speech is necessarily individual; the specific instance from which the present results is each time new. Consequently, linguistic temporality should be realized in the intrapersonal universe of the speaker as an experience that is irremediably subjective and impossible to transmit. (“Language and Human Experience,” 1965/1974, p. 76, my trans.)

But here too the functioning of language transcends the logical impossibility. In actual linguistic communication, my temporality “is immediately accepted as his own by my interlocutor.”

Something singular, very simple and infinitely important occurs which accomplishes what seemed logically impossible: the temporality which is mine when it orders my speech is immediately accepted as his own by my interlocutor. (“Language and Human Experience,” 1965/1974, p. 76, my trans.)

Strikingly, Benveniste concludes here his reflection by using the same metaphor as ten years before. “Both are thus tuned to the same wavelength.”

Both are thus tuned to the same wavelength. The time of discourse is neither reduced to the divisions of chronic time nor locked in a solipsistic subjectivity. It functions as an intersubjectivity factor, which, unipersonal as it should be, makes it omnipersonal. (“Language and Human Experience,” 1965/1974, p. 77, my trans.)

Thus, the subject has no part in the sociological and psychological oscillations between individual and society, ego and others. Thanks to its implantation in the activity of language, it can be at the same time—and without any difficulty—personal and “omnipersonal.”

The second conclusion reached by Benveniste concerns the non-identity of the subject to himself. Subjectivity is according to Benveniste entirely dependent on language. But here we end up with another paradox. Language is, in fact, what allows the subject to “emerge,” but it is also the I which conversely allows each speaker to “appropriate for himself” the language. On the one hand, says Benveniste:

Language is accordingly the possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity, and discourse provokes the emergence of subjectivity because it consists of discrete instances. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 263)

However, on the other hand—and in the same movement of thought—he also writes:

Language [Le langage] is so organized that it permits each speaker to appropriate [for/to] himself an entire language [s'approprier la langue entière] by designating himself as I. [...] In some way language puts forth “empty” forms which each speaker, in the exercise of discourse, appropriates [for] himself and which he relates to his “person,” at the same time defining himself as I and a partner as you. The instance of discourse is thus constitutive of all the coordinates that define the subject and of which we have briefly pointed out only the most obvious. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, pp. 262-263, my mod.)

But then a question arises. What about this speaker “appropriat[ing] for/to himself the language” and “designating himself as I.” Isn't there a circle difficult to explain? Is he already a subject before he becomes I? We seem to be getting into an insurmountable difficulty.

In fact, the problem evaporates when we realize that we must not think of the speaker in a position of anteriority or posteriority in relation to language. As we have seen, in Benveniste's eyes we only have to deal with the “speaking man,” that is to say, not only man as able to speak but also man while he is “actually speaking to another man.”

We can never get back to man separated from language and we shall never see him inventing it. We shall never get back to man reduced to himself and exercising his wits to conceive of the existence of another. It is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man, and language provides the very definition of man. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 259)

Thus the subjectivation process is absolutely indivisible and not reducible to “moments,” even if Benveniste distinguishes in his first papers what he calls “the person” of the speaker (his body, his emotions mainly) from “the subject” he becomes in his act of speech. The difficulty arises from our habit of thought which opposes doing and being, present and past or future, here and elsewhere. But, with regard to subjectivity in language, these pairs do not hold, because among the two elements that compose them, only the first is in fact determining. The subject is always already an I-here-now which establishes the marks themselves in the name of which we can oppose ourselves to the world and order space and time. The linguistic subject, being the condition of possibility of the reference and of the ordering of space-time, is not therefore susceptible of an analysis based on the conditions relating to these.

It is true, on the other hand, that this implies thinking of the subject as made up of discrete instances. Indeed, if I or you, or the deictics and the present tense, have no external reference to the utterance that gives them a certain stability, they are entirely and immediately dependent on the successive instances of discourse in which they appear. And Benveniste does not shy away from this consequence.

I signifies “the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I.” This instance is unique by definition and has validity only in its uniqueness. If I perceive two successive instances of discourse containing I, uttered in the same voice, nothing guarantees to me that one of them is not a reported discourse, a quotation in which I could be imputed to another. (“The Nature of Pronouns,” 1956/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 252)

Ten years later, he also notes that as soon as one human being pronounces the empty terms that the “formal enunciation apparatus” provides him with, he becomes, “each time, a new person.”

As soon as the pronoun I [je] appears in a statement where it evokes—explicitly or not—the pronoun you [tu] to be opposed together to he [il], a human experience is established anew and reveals the linguistic instrument which founds it [... ]. As soon as one of the human beings pronounces them, he assumes them, and the pronoun I [je], part of a paradigm, is transmuted into a unique designation and produces, each time, a new person. (“Language and Human Experience,” 1965/1974, p. 68, my trans.)

Thus subjectivity seems to lose all permanent substance and to transform itself into discrete acts of discourse from which it “receives its reality.”

Outside of actual discourse, the pronoun is only an empty form, which cannot be attached to either an object or a concept. It receives its reality and its substance from discourse alone. (“Language and Human Experience,” 1965/1974, p. 68, my trans.)

But this is precisely this non-substantial and non-unitary aspect of the subject that allows it to function and makes possible the integration in human society of the individuals who mobilize it in turn one after the other.

By extending the fundamental dynamic orientation of Saussure's theory of language—who has been wrongly portrayed by too many of his followers as a prestructuralist before naturally becoming the scarecrow of poststructuralists (Michon, 2010, Chap. 5)—Benveniste thus developed a radically new theory of the subject. Insofar as language is at the same time the interpreter of society and the site of the subjectivation of any speaker, the subject appears to be completely independent of the individual—whether the latter be, in fact, considered as a producer or as a product of society. Seen from language, the subject is neither a pole of psychological identity, nor the result of social subjugation. By actualizing the empty forms of language, the speaker simultaneously accesses the personal and the omnipersonal levels. The subject leaves behind the traditional opposition between psychological and sociological categories and, by a logical tour de force, as remarkable as it is banal, ensures the speaker the possibility of expressing his irreducible specificity, while being nevertheless understood by his interlocutors. It thus founds both the subjectivity of the person and the intersubjectivity which is at the basis of society itself. Of course, this paradoxical role has a price: the non-identity of the subject to itself.

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Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Subjectivity – Part 3

Pascal Michon — 2021-02-08T14:30:00Z

Previous chapter

We will see that Benveniste's essays on general linguistics unfortunately received a mixed reception from the members of the rhythmic constellation. Nevertheless, our investigation has shown why we must certainly grant him one of the very first places. Compared to Lefebvre's still Platonic approach and even that of Foucault, who illuminatingly described the social consequences of the diffusion of the metron in modern societies and developed a ground-breaking conception of time without though never addressing the question of rhythm, that of Benveniste was much more innovative, at least rhythmologically speaking. He proposed nothing less than to reconsider the theories of language, society, subjectivity and time from an entirely new rhuthmic perspective which revolutionized the conditions of rhythmanalysis.

1. In the two previous chapters, we have seen how Benveniste radically transformed, at the very beginning of the 1950s, the understanding of the concept of rhythm and, probably in the wake of this discovery, how he outlined, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, the contours of a new theory of language which broke free from most dominant models of the time—and made them suddenly strangely outdated. On the one hand, he engaged in a devastating critique of the semiotic basis that supported most social sciences as well as most kinds of philosophy, without joining either with the philosophers who opposed semiotics and dualism from a sheer ontological or naturalistic point of view. On the other hand, on the basis of the brand new semantics resulting from this change, he sketched the outlines of a revolutionary conception of man opposed to all ahistoric and historicist anthropologies, as well as to all anti-anthropology. By comparing it with Ricœur's soft kind of hermeneutics, to which it could seem close at first (due, for instance, to their common use of the concept of interaction), we realized that Benveniste rendered possible a radically historical anthropology, which was not the case for Ricœur which still postulated the existence of an ahistorical moral core, the ipse.

2. This new chapter has helped us to specify the characteristics of this historical anthropology through the description of the functioning of subjectivity in language.

2.1 Apart from its semiotic apparatus—which is not entirely disregarded by Benveniste but which must be subject to the primacy of semantic activity—language offers places (the I but also the deictics and the verbal present tense) which are, in a certain sense, imperative and therefore transcendent to the speakers, but which are, also, always empty (non-conceptual, non-referential, non-semiotic) and therefore always available for a complex process of appropriation which allows each individual to access subjectivity through a semantic activity including setting temporality and spatiality, referring to things, and interaction with other human beings—all these relations being each time set up in a particular manner and yet understood, accepted and taken up by the interlocutor as soon as he or she speaks.

2.2 We noticed that the existence of this process does not mean, however, that the subject would remain firm and constant throughout its unfolding as a substantial self. This will be a mistake often repeated by Benveniste's readers, as we will see for instance when we look into Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. In fact, Benveniste, without indulging in time ontology, hard hermeneutics, deconstruction, or hyper-pragmatism recognized that subjectivity is, at the same time as it emerges, caught in mobile relations with other speakers with whom it has to share pronominal forms, processes of construction of reference and present, and composed of discrete instantiations, each speech act triggering, so to speak, a new subjective spark.

3. Here again, the concept of rhuthmos fits perfectly with Benveniste's suggestions.

3.1 Seen from enunciation theory and semantics, subjectivity is real and universal while being radically historical, in other words it is endowed with a certain consistency but it is nevertheless flowing through time—and vice versa, subjectivity is always flowing but assumes specific manners of flowing, which provide it with a certain firmness. In short, the subject should be taken neither as an essential or substantial self nor as an illusion covering an actual dispersion, but through the rhuthmic flow of its instantiations. Subjectivity is an anthropological rhuthmos.

3.2 This description must naturally be correlated with those made previously concerning the relation between language and society as well as between language and individual. Not only is language the “interpreter” of all other semiotic systems which function in society, but it offers the individuals both the means and the opportunities to perform interactions. Consequently, the subjectivation supported by the activity of language involves the production, maintenance or disruption of social ties. In this sense, language is the deepest foundation of interaction and therefore of society, which should not be taken either as a substantial whole or as a mere addition of separate individuals but through the rhuthmic flow of its interactions. Every society, every social group, in this sense, is a sociological bundle of rhuthmoi.

3.3 Strikingly, Benveniste gives the activity of language an even wider role: not only is it responsible for the fluent cohesion of subjectivity and society but it also founds “humanity” itself. Indeed, “in the absence of language, says he, there would be neither the possibility of society nor the possibility of humanity.” In short, thanks to the “formal apparatus of enunciation,” any human being can participate in the semantic and pragmatic production of the signifiance in language and therefore in the correlated rhuthmic phenomena of subjectivation, sociation and humanitation—if we may say so—involved in it.

I would say that long before serving to communicate language serves to live [le langage sert à vivre]. If we posit that in the absence of language, there would be neither the possibility of society nor the possibility of humanity, it is indeed because the characteristic of language is first to signify. (“Form and Meaning in Language,” 1966/1974, p. 217, my trans.)

3.4 Here, Benveniste's elegant formulation, which reduces his argument to its most simple lines, must be however correctly deciphered. “Long before serving to communicate language serves to live,” but in what sense? Can human life also be qualified as rhuthmic? As a matter of fact, in this instance, obviously “live” does not denote primarily an ideal form of life, nor a phenomenological experience, nor a sociological life in common, nor a tense relationship between experience and horizon of expectation, nor a conflicting expression of the will to power—even if we may include all these meanings in Benveniste's concept. It means firstly the anthropological-historical adventure of human beings. It denotes the various manners of flowing that a person's existence, and the existence of the groups to which he or she belongs, have assumed in the past and will assume in the future.

4. In other words, language opens human beings onto their infinite rhuthmic production, it represents, incorporated or immanent in each of us, an absolute in miniature.

4.1 Through the most simple and banal use of language, speakers transform what seem to be strict oppositions between transcendence and immanence, heteronomy and autonomy, society and psyche, into paradoxical interactions, without, however, involving a dialectical or a hermeneutical logic, nor being subjected to a deconstructive process whether of the Heideggerian-hermeneutic or the Nietzschean-pragmatic types. On the contrary, these tense interactions—if they do not develop to the point of becoming destructive or triggering mere repetition and confinement into oneself—are a source of both coherence, and novelty, and even sharing—as we will see when we study Meschonnic—in that the one who emerges as a subject is in fact always engaged, naturally to varying degrees, in a transsubject.

4.2 Because they do not know anything about semantics and remain on the semiotic level of signification and statement—even when they believe they are going beyond it—most philosophers, in fact, for their part, only perceive subjectivation under the form of an individualization: the individualization, always already realized, of a subject instrumentalizing language; the progressive individualization by Aufhebung or hermeneutic spirals of the determinations of meaning; or, in some cases, the de-individualization through subjugation to language conceived as a sign system (Derrida), as a carrier of traditional meaning contents (Gadamer), or as a flat set of statements (Foucault or Deleuze and Guattari).

5. Let us now combine the results of our three chapters and come to some of the deeper philosophical or theoretical consequences of Benveniste's general linguistics.

5.1 Benveniste provides us with a remarkable critical theory that questions most of the major philosophical interpretations of humankind developed in the second half of the 20^th century. Traditional philosophies think of the relation between universality and historicity of humankind starting from an essence of man. Philosophies of communicative action attach it to transcendentals or quasi-transcendentals of intersubjective communication (norms of rational argumentation in Apel; grammar of everyday speech in Habermas or Jean-Marc Ferry). Hegelian and Marxist philosophies presuppose that the universality of man is still alienated both in nature and society and that he will, one day, be emancipated from it by the dialectical process of history (Lefebvre). Philosophies of comprehension subject this relation to an effective history with a subjectivity reduced to an interior moral entity (Ricœur) or without subjectivity (Gadamer). Finally, philosophies of the will to power or pragmatist philosophies dissolve it into a cosmos of forces and actions (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, Rorty).

5.2 By contrast, subjectivity, in Benveniste's sense, is neither a pure principle of freedom and knowledge, nor a condition of possibility of freedom and knowledge, nor a simple result in consciousness of knowledge and action processes. It is radically historical. However, its historicity does not make it either some kind of illusion, a ghost, a mere surface appearance poorly covering the Abgrund – the Abyss, as Heidegger and many of his willing or unwilling followers would like. To put it in a nutshell, from the point of view of semantics and theory of enunciation, subjectivity and human historicity do not stem from a paradigm of Freedom, whether the latter derives from a capacity for language which would differentiate man from animals or from necessarily reflexive forms of communication in societies. Neither does it fall within a paradigm of Destiny, determined by the unsurpassable facticity of a Dasein subject to Language or to the profusion of Life and Forces. The form of life peculiar to humans involved by the use of language implies in itself a regime of radical historicity and it is this particular regime that precisely makes us human. It is a rhuthmic adventure, each time risky and specific, but also most of the time shareable.

6. To conclude, let us briefly touch on two problematic points. One of the most obvious limitations of Benveniste's contribution is certainly his distance from the contemporary discoveries in natural science. To my knowledge, he never mentioned any of them or paid attention to the aspects that could have helped him in his own reflection. The other, more questionable, is the lack of theory and study of literature. Surprisingly, despite his youthful acquaintance with the Surrealists and his awareness of the historical-anthropological importance of language, he never published anything concerning one of its most important uses: its artistic use in poetry, fiction, novel, etc. A few years ago, Chloé Laplantine (1980-) has gathered and presented the notes he took on Baudelaire (Laplantine, 2011) but, despite their obvious interest, Benveniste chose not to or could not publish them. Poetics joined the rhythmological constellation only with Meschonnic's contributions in the 1970s and particularly with his masterwork published in 1982, which will be discussed in the next volume.

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Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Language – Part 1

Pascal Michon — 2021-02-02T15:50:00Z

Sommaire

Previous chapter

In Problems of General Linguistics Vol. I, Benveniste famously claimed that “language is in the nature of man” (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 259). In this chapter, I would like to analyze the peculiar meaning he gave to this statement, to show how it resumed a reflection on the radical historicity of human beings already initiated by Humboldt and Saussure (see Michon 2010) and how it made thereby language itself susceptible of rhuthmic description.

In What Sense is Language in the Nature of Man?

In arguing that “language is in the nature of man,” Benveniste at first glance seemed to blend in with the long philosophical lineage of Aristotle and the Stoics. Language would be a universal anthropological capacity, a nature that we would have in common and which would distinguish us from other animals: “λόγον δὲ μόνον ἄνθρωπος ἔχει τῶν ζῴων – lόgon dè mόnon ánthrôpos ékhei tôn zôiôn” (Aristot. Pol. 1.1253a 10). But the following phrases showed that he was not thinking about this substantialization of language. First of all, for him it was not so much a question of an essence of man, of a metaphysical definition of humanity, as of the universality of the conditions of observation given to us.

We can never get back to man separated from language and we shall never see him inventing it. We shall never get back to man reduced to himself and exercising his wits to conceive of the existence of another. It is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man, and language provides the very definition of man. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 259)

So he joined Humboldt, who wrote for his part:

Wir haben es historisch nur immer mit dem wirklich sprechenden Menschen zu thun – Historically, we have to deal only with the man actually speaking. (W. von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (1836), Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. VII, p. 43 – my trans.)

For both of them, language constituted the necessary and universal condition for any empirical approach to man and society. However, as we know, such a proposition could itself be interpreted in very different ways. To better understand its meaning, I will therefore first go through these various interpretations, then I will propose one that seems to me more adequate to Benveniste's project.

Is Language a Transcendental Condition For Man?

First of all, Benveniste did not seek, as Kantian criticism did, to go back, through a transcendental analysis, to internal linguistic forms (innere Sprachformen) which would constitute the a priori conditions of all thought (Ernst Cassirer, 1874-1945), or, to take a more recent example, to universal norms of rational argumentation, which would be essential to any activity of intercomprehension (Karl-Otto Apel, 1922-2017). In general, it did not seek to establish the legitimacy of an ideal of cognitive or communicative transparency which would found a universal anthropology and a universal history.

Of course, language is indeed, for Benveniste, the first condition of possibility of humanity, but it is not so much because it would constitute the transcendental guarantee of knowledge and human freedom, as because it is the effective place of the “signifiance.” The anthropological scope of language derives less from a priori and anhistoric forms that it would presuppose, than from the “semantic” operations which constitute it, in its radical historicity, as language.

If we posit that in the absence of language, there would be neither the possibility of society, nor the possibility of humanity, it is because the characteristic of language [le propre du langage] is first of all to signify. (“Form and Meaning in Language,” 1966/1974, p. 217, my trans.)

Contrary to Kantian interpretations, Benveniste therefore associated the universality of language with its historicity, however, he did not interpret this historicity as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002). For him, it had nothing to do with the universality of the hermeneutical condition of the Dasein and therefore of its facticity.

Is Language a Hermeneutical Medium For the Being?

Hans-Georg Gadamer proposed, based on Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein and Being, to harden traditional hermeneutics, thereby depriving anthropology of any firm support (for a detailed analysis of Gadamer's philosophy, see Michon, 2000). According to Truth and Method (1960, Eng. trans. 2004), language is not a means by which man could adapt and overcome conflicting conditions. It is above all a collective and traditional practice aimed at interpreting the world, which entirely submits to its specific order and history human beings who wrongly believe that they can progress towards freedom and truth through meticulous and critical use of language. Against all instrumental conceptions, whether naive or sophisticated, Gadamer argued that, by virtue of their very use of language, human beings are in fact embedded in a particular history and culture that shape them. Die Überlieferung – the Lore or Tradition (etymologically over-delivery) constitutes “a stream in which we move and participate, in every act of understanding” (Palmer, 1969, p. 177). Therefore language appears only as a medium of a collective and erratic Wirkungsgeschichte – effective history, which provides inescapable forms of pre-comprehension to human beings and thereby dissolves any autonomous subjectivity into a large and anonymous stream of meanings and interpretations—which actually reflects in language Heidegger's concept of “Sending of the Being.” In short, language and, therefore, Man and Subjectivity are only fragile media through which the mysterious history of the Being unfolds.

Benveniste did not comment on Gadamer's hardened conception of hermeneutics, but it is not difficult to imagine what his position would have been, had he known about it. For him, there was no such thing as what Gadamer called Tradition. First, meanings or preunderstandings do not exist by themselves independently from linguistic and poetic supports. In his reflection on language, Gadamer never takes into account the signifier—to use a Saussurian term—he mentions only ideas and signified. Second, meanings do not constitute aggregates that impose their norms on speakers. Just as the language is not a normative structure which frames the words of the speakers but reinvents itself each time they speak, “Tradition,” in other words cultural heritage, is not a set of indisputable meanings which could only be repeated as they are or only marginally altered. Third, if the subject is not a metaphysical entity which exists by itself and which instrumentalizes language, this does not mean that it does not exist at all. It simply implies that it emerges through the series or the rhuthmic chain of speech acts performed by the speaker.

Thus, the ontologization of language under the species of Tradition which Gadamer advocates—and with him many philosophers influenced by Heidegger—appears as a mere anthropological inversion. When he unilaterally identifies language with Tradition, he actually reifies it. For it is not Tradition which is the condition for the possibility of speech, but the other way around. It is Gadamer's discursive activity and the adventure of subjectivation that it allows, which gives him the possibility of constituting his specific tradition into an abstract concept of Tradition.

More broadly, Gadamer's ontological hermeneutics represents a clear case of metaphysical reasoning which promotes an anti-anthropology and a kind of mystical worldview, albeit devoid of the figure of God, close to Heidegger's and based on the disputable premise of the primacy of the “being” over the activity of language.

In a famous study, Benveniste dismissed this very hypothesis by convincingly showing that Greek and subsequently Western ontological categories, were directly linked with the particular categories of the Greek language and, more generally, of the Indo-European languages. This was the case for Aristotle's table of categories.

In working out this table of “categories,” Aristotle [...] thought he was defining the attributes of objects but he was really setting up linguistic entities; it is the language which, thanks to its own categories, makes them to be recognized and specified. [...] It follows that what Aristotle gave us as a table of general and permanent conditions is only a conceptual projection of a given linguistic state. (“Categories of Thought and Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 60-61).

But this was equally true with the most abstract of all these categories, that of Being. Although it has usually been considered by Western philosophers as a sheer datum, independent of thought and language, the category of Being has been actually derived by the first Greek philosophers mainly from three specific characteristics of their language: the existence of a verb to be “which is by no means a necessity in every language”; the possibility to use it as a “logic copula”; and the possibility to transform the verb into “a nominal notion, treated as a thing” which “gave rise to varieties.”

This remark can be elaborated further. Beyond the Aristotelian terms, above that categorization, there is the notion of “being” which envelops everything. Without being a predicate itself, “being” is the condition of all predicates. All the varieties of “being-such,” of “state,” all the possible views of “time,” etc., depend on the notion of “being.” Now here again, this concept reflects a very specific linguistic quality. Greek not only possesses a verb “to be” (which is by no means a necessity in every language), but it makes very peculiar uses of this verb. It gave it a logical function, that of the copula (Aristotle himself had remarked earlier that in that function the verb did not actually signify anything, that it operated simply as a synthesis), and consequently this verb received a larger extension than any other whatever. In addition, “to be” could become, thanks to the article, a nominal notion, treated as a thing; it gave rise to varieties, for example its present participle, which itself had been made a substantive, and in several kinds (τό ὄν; οἱ ὄντες; τὰ ὄντα); it could serve as a predicate itself, as in the locution τὸ τὶ ἦν εἶναɩ designating the conceptual essence of a thing, not to mention the astonishing diversity of particular predicates with which it could be construed, by means of case forms and prepositions.... (“Categories of Thought and Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 61).

To conclude on this point, Benveniste started certainly from the fact that language signifies, but man's signifying activity cannot be reduced to the understanding and interpretation of inherited significations. To the extent that it is radically historical, the signifiance is also, and always, subjectivation—and if I may say so—sociation and humanitation. Far from dealing only with the meaning of the énoncés (the statements independent of context), the signifiance produced in the énonciation (the act of stating as tied to context) has a historical-anthropological stake. As a result, it cannot be reduced to transcendental conditions of possibility, however transcendentally vanishing like those of hard hermeneutics. If the universality of language cannot guarantee human knowledge and freedom, it does not imply, as Gadamer claimed, dissolving them into an “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte). Language is neither the transcendental foundation of a universal anthropology and a universal History, nor the milieu of the enslavement of man and subject to a local Fate.

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Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Language – Part 2

Pascal Michon — 2021-02-02T09:34:00Z

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Is Language a Dialectical Medium For Man?

Benveniste was therefore foreign to any transcendental interpretation of the universality of language, whether the latter was seen from the a priori of validity and freedom, or from that of facticity and servitude. However, neither did he interpret the universality of language as Jürgen Habermas (1929-) and Jean-Marc Ferry (1946-) did by trying to reconcile the two previous positions within a pragmatic phenomenology of the world of life (Lebenswelt).

Of course, for him language was indeed a universal in and through which human beings can construct themselves, form societies and constitute a historical world. But this anthropological-historical production does not follow the logic of a reappropriation of an alienated part of the subject, of society or of humanity, and of their overcoming in higher subjective, social and anthropological units.

In The Theory of Communicative Action (2 vol., 1981. Eng. trans. 1984 and 1987), Habermas argued that any discursive re-actualization of particular preunderstandings of the world, to which our facticity subjects us, necessarily takes place under the formal and universal conditions of the grammar of ordinary language. Thus, reason presupposed by language makes it possible to tear ourselves away from tradition and to transform human historicity into a process of emancipation. Therefore, the dialectical form of becoming gives a progressive meaning to history.

For Benveniste, nothing in the functioning of language itself allows us to affirm that such a dialectical development does indeed exist. If we observe, from the language, the relationships between general and particular, or between identity and otherness, in both cases we see a very different logic from that highlighted by Habermas on a basis which still remains Hegelian. Let us take two examples which will allow us to outline Benveniste's thought on this subject in broad outline: that of the relations between la langue and society, and that of the relations between individual and society.

First example: the relationship between language and society. We must of course take into account the fact that Benveniste here takes neither la langue – the language nor la société – the society simply in the sense of a particular empirical idiom and of a particular empirical collectivity, but in that of the general principles of all languages and all societies.

On the one hand, there is society as an empirical, historical datum ; we are talking about Chinese society, French society, Assyrian society. On the other hand, there is society as a human collectivity, the basis and the first condition of human existence. In the same way there is language [la langue] as an empirical, historical idiom, the Chinese language, the French language, the Assyrian language; and there is language [la langue] as a system of signifying forms, the first condition of communication. (“Structure of Language and Structure of Society” 1968/1974, p. 94, my trans.)

We know that for Habermas, the relation of interpretation which goes from language to society is like a reflection. Language, put into action in the discourse, is what allows subjects to go beyond the particularities implied by their belonging to social world and tradition, and to build a common world in a movement articulating conservation, emancipation and self-subjectivation. Benveniste, for his part, describes a completely different relationship between language and society. He begins by criticizing the traditional sociological position which makes language one institution among many.

The sociologist, and probably anyone who looks into the question in dimensional terms, will observe that language [la langue] functions within society, which encompasses it; he will therefore decide that society is the whole, and language [la langue], the part. (“Semiology of Language,” 1969/1974, p. 62, my trans.)

But, this sociological “interlocking relationship” [relation d'emboîtement] has a fixist, even metaphysical aspect: “Objectifying external dependencies, [it] similarly reifies language [le langage] and society” (p. 62). Relying on the primacy of society over language (whether this primacy is thought of in individualistic or holistic terms), sociologists and anthropologists cannot but consider language, and even more seriously, their own object, society, only in an ultimately anti-historical form. They take their constructions for things existing in themselves. Consequently, they cannot grasp their dynamic relations of internal dependencies, nor their transformations. This is why, Benveniste adds, if we want to grasp language and society in their full historicity, we must radically reverse this conception.

The semiological consideration reverses this relationship, because only language [seule la langue] allows society. Language [La langue] is what holds people together, the foundation of all relationships which in turn form the foundation of society. (“Semiology of Language,” 1969/1974, p. 62, my trans.)

Thus, we must say that it is la langue – the language, which, thanks to its semiological power of “interpretancy,” [interprétance – a neologism in Fr.] encompasses or “contains” society—and not the other way around, as sociologists and anthropologists most often presuppose. Paradoxically, however, only such a reversal of perspective makes it possible to observe language and society in the full historicity of their internal mutual relations, because it “puts them in mutual dependence according to their capacity for semiotization.”

We can then say that it is the language [la langue] that contains society. Thus the interpretancy relationship [la relation d'interprétance], which is semiotic, goes the reverse of the interlocking relationship [la relation d'emboîtement], which is sociological. Since the latter objectifies the external dependencies, it similarly reifies language and society, while the former puts them in mutual dependence according to their capacity for semiotization. (“Semiology of Language,” 1969/1974, p. 62, my trans.)

In another article from the same period, Benveniste insists on the interdependence that paradoxically accompanies the asymmetric relation of interpretancy.

Language poses and supposes the other. Immediately, society is given with language [le langage]. Society in turn only holds together through the common use of communication signs. Immediately, language [le langage] is given with society. So each of these two entities, language [le langage] and society, implies the other. (“Structure of Language and Structure of Society,” 1968/1974, p. 91, my trans.)

We must beware here the following fact: the relations which link language and society are not of a reflexive type. They develop between “an interpreting system and an interpreted system,” or between a system “which articulate[s]” because it manifests its “own semiotics” and a system which “[is] articulated and whose semiotics only appear through the grid of another mode of expression.”

INTERPRETANCY RELATIONSHIP. We thus designate that which we institute between an interpreting system and an interpreted system. From the point of view of language [de la langue], it is the fundamental relationship, the one which separates systems into systems which articulate, because they manifest their own semiotics, and systems which are articulated and whose semiotics only appear through the grid of another mode of expression. (“Semiology of Language,” 1969/1974, p. 61, my trans., Benveniste's capitals)

The language is, in fact, the only complete semiotic, or rather semiological, system and serves as a generating model for all the others.

Language [la langue] is the semiotic organization par excellence. It gives the idea of what a sign function is, and it is the only one to offer its exemplary formula. (“Semiology of Language,” 1969/1974, p. 63, my trans.)

Only la langue – language makes signs work on two levels: “Language [la langue] gives us the only model of a system which is semiotic both in its formal structure and in its functioning” (p. 63). On the one hand, formally, it consists “of distinct units, each of which is a sign” (p. 62) and which are generated and received “with the same reference values among all members of a community” (p. 62). On the other hand, in terms of its functioning, it manifests itself in the enunciation which, simultaneously, carries “reference to a given situation” and constitutes “the only actualization of intersubjective communication” (p. 62). Language [la langue] is therefore the only signifying system to be invested with a “DOUBLE SIGNIFIANCE.”

This is properly a model without analog. Language [la langue] combines two distinct modes of meaning, which we call the SEMIOTIC mode of one part, the SEMANTIC mode of the other. (“Semiology of Language,” 1969/1974, p. 63, my trans., Benveniste's capitals)

La langue therefore possesses and exercises less a power of reflection than a power of “SEMIOTIC MODELING” vis-à-vis all other signifying systems, in particular society.

From this it results that it alone can confer—and it does indeed confer—on other sets the quality of signifying systems by in-forming them with the sign relation [...]. The nature of language, its representative function, its dynamic power, its role in relational life make it the great semiotic matrix, the shaping structure whose other structures reproduce the features and mode of action. (“Semiology of Language,” 1969/1974, p. 63, my trans.)

Furthermore, as far as society is concerned, this “semiotic modeling”—which should perhaps be better qualified as semiological since it includes both semiotics and semantics—has a remarkable consequence. Indeed, insofar as it combines the two modes of signifiance, language allows the founding tour de force by which the singular, the specific and the particular proper to a speaker are articulated with the general and the common meanings recognized by his society. Thanks to it, it is possible to refer to given and occasional situations, while transmitting and receiving with common reference values for all members of a community. In this sense, language is therefore the first condition of the relationship between the singular-specific and the general, the particular and the common, which founds society. But we see that it establishes this relationship in a way that in no way involves a dialectical play, since it does not imply so much going beyond traditional norms and particular situations towards a socio-historical state, better shared, more general and more rational, than founding the simple possibility of an infinite communication between the two orders, with respect for one and the other.

This conclusion brings me to the second example: that of the relationship between individual and society. We have just seen that, according to Benveniste, the fact that la langue – the language is invested with a double signifiance allows any speaker to appropriate it for his own account, to refer in a singular, particular and specific way, while being understood by other individuals, who do the same on their side. Language therefore makes communication between individuals possible and thus forms the condition of possibility of their community. But this founding power, let's call it a priori, is also accompanied by a dynamic power to carry out relationships concretely. Indeed, when a speaker expresses his singularity or his specificity, he “sets himself up as a subject, by referring to himself as I in his speech,” but, simultaneously and necessarily, he also posits another person, “the one who, being, as he is, completely exterior to ‘me,' becomes my echo to whom I say you [tu] and who says you [tu] to me.” We'll come back to this point in more details below.

Language is possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as I in his discourse. Because of this, I [je ] posits another person, the one who, being, as he is, completely exterior to “me,” becomes my echo to whom I [je ] say you [tu] and who says you [tu] to me. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 260).

From the point of view of language, therefore, there is no dualism between subjectivation and sociation. Not only can the singular and the general, the particular and the common, communicate, but I and you are posed simultaneously and inseparably. The production of society is just as much a production of the subject. Both must be caught in the radical historicity of their common and concomitant production.

And so the old antinomies of “I” [“moi”] and “the other,” of the individual and society, fall. It is a duality which it is illegitimate and erroneous to reduce to a single primordial term, whether this unique term be the “I” [le “moi”], which must be established in the individual's own consciousness in order to become accessible to that of the fellow human being, or whether it be, on the contrary, society, which as a totality would preexist the individual and from which the individual could only be disengaged gradually, in proportion to his acquisition of self-consciousness. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 260).

Benveniste qualifies this production as “dialectical.” It is, he says, “in a dialectical reality encompassing the two terms and defining them by mutual relation that one discovers the linguistic basis of subjectivity” (p. 260). But we must not be mistaken. Contrarily to what Jean-Claude Milner claims (2008, p. 125-141), Benveniste does not give the adjective “dialectical” a Hegelian sense here. This relation which defines the terms through their “mutual relation” is much closer to the Socratic dialectic or better yet, to Humboldt's Wechselwirkung than to the Hegelian Aufhebung.

The polarity of the persons provided by language, he says, “does not mean either equality or symmetry: ‘ego' always has a position of transcendence with regard to you [tu].” However, this transcendence does not imply any negativity, nor any reflection. The successive instantiations of the I do not participate in a reappropriation of an in-itself alienated in the other. They produce neither a negation of the social, nor a going beyond of the I into a higher stage of self-consciousness. The interdependence of the two poles of subjectivity is based on a reversible transcendence which does not involve any play between identity and negativity, but is more akin to an alternating opposition between interior and exterior. To conclude on this point, subjectivation and sociation are certainly in a historical interdependence, but their historicity is in no way dialectical.

[The polarity of persons] is a polarity, moreover, very peculiar in itself, as it offers a type of opposition whose equivalent is encountered nowhere else outside of language. This polarity does not mean either equality or symmetry: “ego” always has a position of transcendence with regard to you [tu]. Nevertheless, neither of the terms can be conceived of without the other; they are complementary, although according to an “interior/exterior” opposition, and, at the same time, they are reversible. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 260).

So, whatever the angle from which we observe it, language is not for Benveniste, as it is for Habermas or Ferry, primarily, the medium that allows man to access to knowledge and freedom. As regards the relation of language to society, as for that of the individual to society, the critical position taken by Benveniste does not consist in showing the dialectical work of the opposing elements of the couples he considers, nor, on the other hand, by returning to a pre-dialectical position, by confining himself to noting their irreducible opposition. By placing himself exclusively from the point of view of language, he seeks to follow the specific character of the paradoxical logics of hierarchical semiotic interdependence and of reversible subjective transcendence. He thus builds the first foundations of a theory of historicity which is at the same time non-dualistic, non-ontological and non-dialectical.

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Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Language – Part 3

Pascal Michon — 2021-02-02T09:31:00Z

Sommaire

Previous chapter

Is Language a Hermeneutical Medium For Man?

These conclusions might seem, at first glance, to bring the Benvenistian conception of language closer to the less radical hermeneutical conceptions developed from the 1970s by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913-2005) in a series of remarkable books: La Métaphore vive, 1975 – The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, 1978; Temps et récit, 3 vol., 1983-1985 – Time and Narrative, 1984-1988; and Soi-même comme un autre, 1990 – Oneself as Another, 1992. Indeed, unlike Hans-Georg Gadamer, the latter proposed a hermeneutical conception of language that left room for subjectivation.

A certain number of points clearly distinguishes, however, this conception from that of Benveniste. In the classic hermeneutical tradition initiated at the beginning of the 19^th century by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), with which Ricœur reconnected over Gadamer's ontological re-interpretation, language was considered as a human medium which implies that meaning is both inherited and produced, found and reinterpreted. The text and the reader, the common social world and the individual are thus caught in spirals in which determinism and freedom constantly revive each other. As a result, these spirals cannot be reduced to a dialectical progress, but a subjective construction nonetheless remains possible even if it is uncertain.

This conception of language comes up against two difficulties however. First, in these interactions, the opposite poles are considered equivalent, which they are by no means, as we have just seen, in the eyes of Benveniste for whom language and society, the I and the you, are certainly in interaction but remain clearly hierarchical. Second, these spirals are seen as transcendental forms of the historical flow and remain entirely undetermined. Soft hermeneutics thus avoids the traps linked both to fixism and to dialectics, but it does not make it possible to differentiate between the different qualities or historical specificities of the movements during which subjectivation occurs. This is the reason why it tends to reassign to the subject a certain anhistoricity in the form of a universal moral “ipseity”or selfhood (Ricœur, 1990).

We do not find anything of the kind in Benveniste who does not locate the source of ethics and politics in an interior refuge but in the activity itself of human beings: each speech act is an ethical, social and political action by which the relations between human beings—and therefore the subject himself—are constantly reinvented.

Saying hello every day of your life to someone is a reinvention every time. (“Structuralism and Linguistics,” 1968/1974, p. 19, my trans.)

At the same time, this conception of the radical historicity of subjectivation does not lead, like that advocated by Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) on poststructuralist bases, which Ricœur rightly rejected, in a pulverization of the subjectivity, because it is framed by what Benveniste calls the “formal apparatus of enunciation.” This apparatus, in particular, explains why the linguistic interactions during which the subject emerges do not occur as simple formally similar spirals but as relatively unified and each time specific ways of flowing which are possible to distinguish ethically and politically (for examples, see Michon, 2005/2016 and 2007/2015c). I will come back to this point in the next chapter.

Is Language a Part of a Larger Pragmatic Order?

This conclusion brings me to the last interpretation given to the idea of universality of language. If Benveniste extracts the theory of language from the transcendental, ontological, dialectical and hermeneutical models, then should we see in his theory, as Derrida puts it—rather mischievously—of Austin, a theory backed by a Nietzschean conception of historicity? For him, is language reducible to acts of speech “withdrawn from the authority of the value of truth, from the opposition true/false” and referred to the only “value of force, of difference of force? (illocutionary or perlocutionary force).” (Derrida, 1990, p. 37-38, my trans.) Does language merely proceed to transfers of movement or of force?

I showed in volume 3 how important it would be to reconsider Nietzsche in his invisible relationship with Humboldt. Nietzsche who was a trained scholar in philology and who spent many years studying the question of rhythm would certainly appear in a very different light than in these few lines of Derrida. But let us take Nietzsche as he was most often read in those years. Certainly, for Benveniste as for Austin, the performative does not describe something that exists outside language and before it, it is not a mirror that would reflect states of affairs or states of the soul. It is one of the points where the self-referential character of language is instantiated. But he does not consider that the performative, as Derrida says, “produces or transforms a situation,” in short that it “operates” (p. 37) and breaks the self-identity of the being by a perpetual emergence of energy.

Austin immediately places himself in the perspective of the action; he observes the act from the point of view of its completion and outcome. Generally speaking, pragmatics is interested in the “illocutionary” dimension of language, that is to say in what we do when we say something, or even in the action accomplished by the speaker when he utters something (Searle, 1969). Thus, for Austin, “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (Austin, 1962, p. 6). Elsewhere he also says, “to issue such an utterance is to perform the action.” (Sentence taken by Benveniste from the proceedings of the Royaumont colloquium devoted to “Analytical Philosophy and Language” (1962/1963), quoted in Problems in General Linguistics, 1966, p. 269)

Instead of taking the point of view of the action once completed, Benveniste, for his part, is interested in the act itself. He considers that a performative constitutes an act.

The utterance I swear is the very act which pledges me, not the description of the act that I am performing. In saying I promise, I guarantee, I am actually making a promise or a guarantee. The consequences (social, judicial, etc.) of my swearing, of my promise, flow from the instance of discourse containing I swear, I promise. The utterance is identified with the act itself. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 265)

In his eyes, therefore, the pragmatic result in no way defines the performative. The case of the imperative is a significant example.

Thus, while Come here! is indeed an order, linguistically it is something other than saying, “I order you to come here.” (“Analytical Philosophy and Language,” 1963/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 275)

The result is certainly the same, but the linguistic act by which it is produced is totally different. Benveniste continues.

There is no performative utterance unless it contains the mention of the act, namely, I order. The imperative, on the other hand, could be replaced by any procedure that would produce the same result, a gesture, for example, and would no longer have a linguistic reality. (“Analytical Philosophy and Language,” 1963/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 275)

The conclusion is very clear. “It is not this empirical result that counts. A performative utterance is not performative in that it can modify the situation of an individual, but in that it is by itself an act.”

We must not be deceived by the fact that the imperative produces a result, that come here! actually makes the person to whom one spoke come. It is not this empirical result that counts. A performative utterance is not performative in that it can modify the situation of an individual, but in that it is by itself an act. (“Analytical Philosophy and Language,” 1963/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 274)

What characterizes the performative is not therefore to extend language outside of itself, to “perform an action,” as Austin says, but it is “to constitute an act by itself,” i.e. to be “self-referential,” or “referring to a reality that it itself constitutes by the fact that it is actually uttered in conditions that make it an act.”

This leads us to recognize in the performative a peculiar quality, that of being self-referential, of referring to a reality that it itself constitutes by the fact that it is actually uttered in conditions that make it an act. (“Analytical Philosophy and Language,” 1963/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 274)

We see what distinguishes this conception of language from that of the analytical philosopher, of his deconstructionist commentator and, I will add, of the whole pragmatic thought (including sociologists like Habermas), which has emerged from the concept of illocutionary. For Benveniste, language cannot be defined by putting it in continuity with the world and by including it in a larger pragmatic order. Language cannot be integrated into a universal theory of action without losing its specificity. Therefore, it is not possible for him, as one can argue for Austin, to pass from his conception of the universality of language to that of a universality of force. Our language condition is not part of a larger condition of being-in-the-world, into which we would be thrown into a vast field of conflicts between wandering energies that would come to express themselves in completely unconditioned ways.

On the contrary, for Benveniste, as we will see in the next chapter, it is necessary to think of our being-in-the-world starting from our being-in-and-by-language, because it is language that allows us to instantiate, through acts, points of reference which form the bases of our subjectivity as well as our perception of space and time (I-here-now, deictics, verbal tenses), as well our referential activity (I/you-he), as well as our relation to others (I/you). It is therefore the activity of language, better yet, the organized activity of language, in short the rhuthmoi of language, which found our historicity and not the other way around.

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Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Language – Part 4

Pascal Michon — 2021-02-02T09:29:00Z

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Language as Rhuthmic Basis of a Radically Historical Anthropology

As we can see, Benveniste's answer to the question “in what sense is language in the nature of man?” was quite extraordinary. For him, language is in the nature of man because it sets the conditions for a radically historical anthropology, this expression having to be understood simultaneously in two complementary ways.

First, unlike that presupposed by liberal, Hegelian or soft hermeneutical theories, this anthropology is radically historical. In all cases analyzed so far, the activity of language is exercised—and its anthropological and social correlates occur—neither according to beneficial a priori conditions of possibility, nor as the generation of the positive through the negative, nor in a constructive back-and-forth movement between object and mind. It does not necessarily lead to progress.

But, on the other hand, contrary to neo-Heideggerian or neo-Nietzschean theories, this radical historicity still remains the basis for an anthropology, which is neither cripplingly limited by factual and traditional conditions of possibility, nor by totally heterogeneous and external power relations. It is true that language activity is not backed by abstract, dialectic and hermeneutic schemes, which are in fact only derived from it, but this activity is never entirely determined by its conditions either, whether in terms of Tradition flows or of Power wars, and remains always capable of introducing bifurcations and novelty, innovation and creation.

When it is observed for itself the activity of language appears as highly paradoxical—which does not mean here contradictory but endowed with an infinite potential.

Like for Saussure as a matter of fact, for Benveniste linguistics singles out terms that are first separated and hierarchized. Language encompasses society and the I transcends the you. Therefore, there cannot be no synthetic surpassing of the two elements of the pairs considered. However, at the same time, although they are hierarchized, the poles of these pairs are always taken in their mutual production. Instead of similarly reifying language and all semiological systems that constitute society, like in the sociological interlocking relation, the linguistic relation of interpretancy makes it possible to observe them in their mutual generation. Likewise for subjectivity, while the point of view of social science reifies the individual or the social or both at the same time, the linguistic reversible relation of transcendence which links the I and the you allows us to grasp them through their simultaneous coproduction.

Among the various philosophical interpretations of language presented above, this schema could seem the closest with the hermeneutical circle which highlights, for its part, the back-and-forth movements between reader and text, scientist and object, philosopher and tradition. By introducing the idea of interaction, soft hermeneutics fares certainly better, as far as language is concerned, than previous theories, but she believes wrongly that the two poles considered have equal status and she finally reduces interaction to a mere circle. She does not take into consideration the fundamentally paradoxical nature of language, which for Benveniste, as for Saussure (see Michon, 2010, Chap. 5), is the key to its understanding.

Some linguists reproach Saussure for a propensity to emphasize paradoxes in the functioning of language. But language is actually the most paradoxical thing in the world, and unfortunate are those who do not see this. The further one goes, the more one feels this contrast between oneness as a category of our perception of objects and the pattern of duality which language imposes upon our thought. (“Saussure After Half a Century,” 1963/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, pp. 41-42)

Note that it is, for Benveniste, this paradoxical nature of language that makes “the condition of man” “unique.”

It is a polarity, moreover, very peculiar in itself, as it offers a type of opposition whose equivalent is encountered nowhere else outside of language. [...] If we seek a parallel to this, we will not find it. The condition of man in language is unique. (“Subjectivity in Language,” 1958/1966, trans. M. E. Meek, 1971, p. 260).

Moreover, soft hermeneutics still considers wrongly that the meaning unfolds as it were independently of the operation of language. She remains within the framework of the énoncé – statement, which is her main interpretation tool, and totally ignores the énonciation – enunciation. Instead, Benveniste places, as we will see, the center of language activity in the “formal apparatus of enunciation” and not in the unfolding of the meaning. Consequently, unlike Ricœur's hermeneutics which associates subjectivity only with narrative (see Michon, 2010, Chap. 8), Benveniste's theory renders possible a deep linguistic anthropology of subjectivity more interested in philological and historical description of the specific configurations assumed by the interaction than in its general form.

Although Benveniste never mentioned explicitly any link between this peculiar conception of the activity of language and his previous study on the notion of rhythm before and after Plato, it is not hard to see now how they could be related. Indeed, whether in the case of the relations between language and society, or in that of the relations between society and individual, or, as we will see in the next chapter, in that of the functioning of the enunciation apparatus responsible for the emergence of subjectivity, we always deal with “form[s] in the instant that [they are] assumed by [something] moving, mobile, fluid” or, when we take duration into consideration, with “particular manner[s] of flowing.” The moving configurations assumed in their complex interactions by society, individual and subjectivity, under the aegis of language, constitute genuine rhuthmoi, impermanent forms or even sometimes manners of flowing, assumed by a common and fundamental movement of production.

By reworking the notion of rhythm and unveiling that of rhuthmos, Benveniste laid certainly the foundation for the revolutionary theory of language which he developed from the end of the 1950s until the early 1970s, and thus provided us with powerful tools capable of going beyond most philosophical paradigms available in the 20^th century, and of accounting for the radical historicity of man. For him, language provides a solid basis for anthropology, but not because it offers the transcendental conditions necessary for the development of human thought and action, nor of course because, on the contrary, language would in fact only be a simple means by which Being and Truth would express themselves without any consideration for Man, nor because it constitutes a dialectical medium combining transcendental and factual conditions by which Man would not only be rendered capable but also encouraged to develop his knowledge and to emancipate himself, neither because it provides a hermeneutical medium through which Man could painfully progress in his knowledge of the world and possibly expand his freedom, nor, finally, because it constitutes a very thin film unable to protect the human beings from the erratic play of natural and social forces roaming the world. Language is the natural foundation of anthropology because it is radically historical and fully rhuthmic.

In his Problems in General Linguistics, Benveniste developed a unique conception of language.

1. By bringing to light the semantic functioning of language, left out by most previous models, Benveniste allowed us to free ourselves from the dualism of semiotics—whether it is based on the traditional model of the Sign or on the more modern model of la Langue. Language cannot be comprehended from and within the semiotic framework in which a large part of philosophy remains caught, even today.

1.1 Philosophy, in her traditional, modern and dialectical versions, subscribes to the fundamentally negative definition of language implied by the concept of sign as representative of an absent thing. As medieval Scholastics once said, a sign is aliquid stat pro aliquo – something that stands for something else. Therefore, all thought is caught up in the oppositions between sign and referent, sign and idea, that is, in the oppositions between language and being, language and thought. Either language hides being and betrays thought, or language is transparent to the grasp of being by thought, or language is a defective medium through which thought is obliged to pass in order to find the being that she herself is.

1.2 In some of its more critical versions, as for example in Gadamer or in Derrida, philosophy criticizes the representationalism of the concept of sign and the difficulties that arise from it, but she remains linked to semiotics in another way. Of course, philosophy now emphasizes language, but she continues to reduce it to la Langue, whether as accumulated meaning treasure or as differential meaning structure. Therefore, she endorses the reduction from signifiance to signification, from enunciation and discourse to statement, from subjectivation to individualization. This de-anthropolization of language leads to a direct or indirect ontologization of time which makes the radical historicity of the subject in language appear only as an essential historicity that finally undermines any claim to become a subject. Even when hermeneutics tries to take discourse into account, as in Ricœur, she only half-leaps and folds it back into rhetoric and narrative, while reducing its semantic and subjective aspects to a simple play between social identity and moral core, what Ricœur calls idem and ipse.

2. According to Benveniste, the universal which constitutes the semantic functioning of language is in fact of a very peculiar type: it is plainly anthropological-historical.

2.1 Its concept does not fall within the logical categories which found the traditional philosophical rationality, because it combines general and particular, totality and part, series and element; nor within the epistemological categories, because it tightly associates subjectivation and the constitution of the space-time; nor within the critical categories, because it is both transcendent and immanent to subjectivity.

2.2 However, it does not fall under dialectical categories either, because if it associates time and forms instead of opposing them, this association does not entail a reflexive process of extracting a spiritual identity from the natural otherness in which she would be alienated. Nor can it be grasped by soft hermeneutical categories that are formally always similar, for it produces ever new forms.

2.3 Finally, it does not get lost in a deconstruction of any category in the name of the ontological difference between Being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende), or in that of a hard hermeneutical difference between Meaning and meanings, or in that of pragmatic difference between natural or cosmic and anthropological forces, because all these perspectives rightly emphasize the nonsubstantial part of language but wrongly deny it its universality and capacity for developing knowledge and freedom. All of these kinds of deconstruction appear in fact as various forms of inconsistent denial, which cannot help but assume for themselves what they reject for others. Their followers love to write, for their own sake and the sake of the public, one is bound to assume, very long books, using all resources of language, to prove that language cannot help us to establish the truth nor to emancipate ourselves from the historical conditions in which we are embedded.

3. Thanks to his description of the semantic activity and his analysis of its anthropological-historical status, Benveniste allows us also to develop our critique of the metric paradigm of rhythm and elaborate further the rhuthmic paradigm we are looking for.

3.1 It has been observed many times that the metric concept of rhythm is related with the semiotic concept of sign (see previous volumes). They certainly share a Platonic ancestry which explains their common dualistic form. Just as the sign is opposed by semiotics to the idea and the thing it refers to and combined into increasingly larger lexical and syntactical units, metrics opposes strong to weak beats and combine them into structures of larger and larger size.

3.2 More studies would be necessary to prove it in a fully satisfactory manner, but from what we already saw in previous research (on Gadamer and Ricœur see Michon, 2010, and on Deleuze and Guattari see next volume), we can safely assume that the various deconstructions of the theory of sign and its dualism, whether they are based on la Langue or on the will to power, have not induced similar deconstructions of metrics. Some of them, like Derrida or Deleuze and Guattari, have glimpsed at the fact that the language flow is non-metrical but, probably for lack of suitable anthropology, they stopped short of proposing any positive theory of its rhuthmic quality. As we will see in the next volume, they have presumed a kind of flat and chaotic nature of language devoid of any depth and organization, de facto hindering subjectivity's development.

3.3 Instead, seen from semantics and enunciation theory, language appears as plainly rhuthmic and plainly anthropological. At the same time flowing and organized, totalized and differentiated, constant and made of discrete and ever new speech acts, it clearly takes impermanent forms and follows specific ways of flowing. However, this flow is never totally liquid or chaotic. Discourse is always endowed with a certain consistency based both on the interaction of the various elements it actualizes and on a general internal tension (for poetic examples of this phenomenon, see Vol. 2, Chap. 8 on Baudelaire, Hopkins and Mallarmé). As we will see now, this rhuthmic consistency is essential to the construction of subjectivity.

Next chapter

Edgar Morin and the Rhuthmoi of Information – Part 1

Pascal Michon — 2020-02-18T20:30:00Z

Sommaire

Previous chapter

This leads us towards the last part of Method which was dedicated to “information” and “communication.” As we saw, the subject had been quite vaguely addressed by Serres—at least in Birth of Physics since the five-volume series entitled Hermès was partly dedicated to it (1969-1980). Let us see how Morin dealt with this question and how far he went on the rhuthmic path he had opened in the previous parts.

If “active organizations” could be characterized as “systems” or better yet, “machines,” and if these machines were endowed with “flowing selves,” this was indeed, Morin argued, mainly and most of the time due to the “signals” or “information” that were circulated in and out of these machines and that ensured their functioning and helped maintain their homeostasis (p. 235). The buckle could thus be closed but the concepts of “information” and “communication” had to be examined first very closely.

Critique of Cybernetics

This informational aspect of “machines” had been revealed by cybernetics as soon as the 1950s. However, Morin noted, Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), as most of his followers as a matter of fact, had from the very beginning “subordinated communication to command,” that is, both underestimated the potential “emancipating power” of communicational machines, and “[hidden] the problem of power” that was concealed behind that of command (p. 237). Cybernetics had uncritically developed out of sheer “engineering” and “technocratic” concerns.

It is on the problem of society which converge, in one great blinding, the deficiencies of cybernetics. The too abstract model of the artificial machine is the fruit of a too concrete practice: engineering. But cybernetics does not have the vision which would allow it to consider its engeenero-social grounding. By that very fact it becomes the theoretical pseudopod of an enslaving organization of work and of a technocentric, technomorphous, and technocratic practice. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 251)

Noticeably, Morin here quoted Georges Friedmann and Henri Lefebvre who had, he claimed, “quite justly denounced cybernetization and ‘cybernanthrope,'” that is the “stretching [of] the vision of an engineer on machines onto all the vast anthropo-social sphere” (p. 252). According to this view, human societies were to be “purged of all disorders” and rationally “functionalized.”

Cybernetics tends and pretends naturally to reduce everything to its model of self-styled rationality: the automated, functionalized machine, purged of all disorders (self-styled optimized), end-purposed for industrial production. It can consider society only as a vast machine to be functionalized. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 252-253)

To oppose the ethical and political biases of cybernetic information theory, Morin suggested, first, to introduce the concept of appareil – apparatus, that is, the “original arrangement which, in communicational organization, ties the processing of information to actions and operations.”

I define the term apparatus as the original arrangement which, in communicational organization, ties the processing of information to actions and operations. As such, the apparatus has the power to transform information into a program, that is to say into organizational constraint. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 238)

This concept, which was “absent from our theories of cybernetics, biology, and, tragically today, of society and politics,” (p. 242) was, according to Morin, the first key to a more adequate perspective on biological as well as social organizations, by allowing not to confuse them with sheer artifacts. In other words, it was a way to translate into social science and political theory the contribution of cybernetics without taking up its limitations.

Its absence renders these theories blind or servile. I am convinced that all theory of communicational organization (embodying, therefore, organization of life and anthropo-social organization) must be reconstructed by developing therein a theory of [Apparatuses]. Such a theory must from the beginning conceive the radical difference which separates the artifact apparatus which organizes from the genetic and neuro-cerebral apparatuses of living beings. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 242, my mod.)

On the one hand, the concept of apparatus allowed to take into account the power of the most complex communicational machines to “‘think' out the situation”, and to “choose” adequate action.

The idea of machine, in the sense that I have indicated, signifies immediately the emancipation of the being in its entirety with respect to external risks and constraints: henceforth, the machine can “think” out the situation; it can find solutions; it can elaborate strategies adapted to the circumstances; it can conceive possibilities of choices and make decisions in function of alternatives; finally, it can trigger action and reaction. The machine, therefore, opens the door to liberty which is: to choose (the second being: to choose its choices). (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 238)

On the other hand, the concept of apparatus did not hide the ethical and political dimension of machines. The same center endowed with self had the power to emancipate as well as that “to live off, exploit, enslave both the parts and the whole.”

The apparatus is, therefore, a part that can appear, simultaneously or alternately: – as the servant of the whole in reference to the dangers which threaten it; – as the executor of the whole with respect to the parts; – as the part which controls the whole, and thereby tends to live off, exploit, enslave both the parts and the whole. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 243)

Indeed, Morin noticed that the evolutionary development of apparatuses, which had become ever more complex until “the upsurge of the social megamachine with its central apparatus, the State” (p. 246), had led to both “the massive enslavement of plants (agriculture) and animals (breeding)” and “the enslavement of enormous masses of humanity” (p. 246, Morin's italics).

Generalizing to the whole universe some Marxist concepts, thereby opening onto an innovative ecological critique, but also joining, by the same token, with Lefebvre's, Foucault's, and Barthes' recent critiques of the mechanization of life rhythms, Morin shed some light, if I may say so, on the obscure face of apparatuses. Through its administrative, military, police and religious sub-apparatuses, the State had “enslave[d] society and organize[d] it into a megamachine.” The administrative apparatus had imposed “machine-like organization” and “uniformized rule,” while the religious and the military apparatuses had imposed “their own machinality,” composed in both cases of “ritual” and “discipline.”

The formidable enslavements of living beings and human beings is inseparable from the formation of a State apparatus, circulating, regulating, decisional which enslaves society and organizes it into a megamachine. The State is the [Apparatus of apparatuses], which concentrates in itself the administrative [apparatus], the military [apparatus], the religious [apparatus], and then the police [apparatus]. The administrative [apparatus] imposes machine-like organization on all of society in the sense that this term signifies uniformized rule, inflexible “mechanics;” religion and army each impose their own machinality, composed in both cases of ritual (preponderant in religion) and of discipline (preponderant in the army). (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 246, my mod.)

However, Morin did not indulge either in the anarchist orientation advocated by Foucault or Barthes, or later Deleuze and Guattari, who rejected any power that was not self-determined. He thought that the State could also have emancipating effects: “The State [apparatus] both emancipates and enslaves” (p. 247, my mod.). Anarchy and State were two sides of the same coin always present in “great historical societies.”

Finally, the great historical societies, from Antiquity to our times, always function between two poles of organization, one pole of rigid order which emanates from the State machine and more broadly from all that is power, the other pole one of infrastructural anarchy, that is to say of spontaneous and spontaneously organizing interactions. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 247)

After having introduced the concept of apparatus, which was meant to clear the way to capitalize on cybernetics without assuming its ethically and politically “obfuscating” power (p. 248), Morin came to the main issue: communication. This concept, as it had been elaborated by cybernetics, should be fundamentally reformed. Indeed, “information” and “communication” could not any longer be reduced to “program” and “transmission” (p. 251); they should instead become “organizer” and even “creator of information” (p. 253).

Consequently, the third part of Method started by elaborating the link between the concept of “active organization” already described in the second part, that of “negentropy” and, finally, that of “information.”

Negentropy was the thermodynamic characterization of the regeneration process that allowed an open system to maintain itself for a certain amount of time. It denoted all “recursive, cyclical, rotative loops” by which open systems as living beings oppose both their loss of energy and increasing disorder.

In dynamic terms, an organization is negentropic if it is endowed with active organizing qualities, which as a last resort necessitate a recursive loop producer-of-self. The concept of negentropy, thus understood, is the thermodynamic face of all regeneration, reorganization, production, reproduction of organization. It springs from and takes shape in the recursive, cyclical, rotative loop, which rebegins endlessly and endlessly reconstructs the integrity or/and the integrality of the machine-being. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 296-297)

Now, at least in living beings, negentropic processes were themselves driven by both the information “inscribed in DNA” and that coming “from the praxic exchanges with the eco-system” (p. 301).

Proteins, which play the active role of transformations and exchanges, are unstable, are subjected unceasingly to degradation (entropy) and are unceasingly reconstituted by the fabricative actions of enzymes, thanks to the informational action of genes whose existence depends on the exchanges and transformations of proteins. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 301)

Conclusion: communication was tightly involved in the perpetuation of living beings. Living machines were negentropic islets “in the ocean of disorder and noise” (p. 300) which could survive a certain amount of time based on their “communicational” capacities.

To be conceived and comprehended, the negentropic organization of life necessitates the introduction of the idea of Information. Living beings can be conceived as negentropic machines constituted by communicational organization of chemical reactions and having a universal informational mechanism inscribed in the DNA of genes. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 304)

From now on, I will introduce at the end or the beginning of each section some comments concerning Morin's astonishing proximity but also distance with another rhuthmic trend of thought that was resurging at the time.

Let us first notice a startling aspect of this critique of cybernetics. By linking information to active organization, and by making information itself creative and organizing, Morin resumed with an old trend of thought in theory of language starting with Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), going through Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), and developing in the second half of the century with Émile Benveniste (1902-1976) and Henri Meschonnic (1932-2009). Like Morin's information theory, these doctrines insisted on considering language firstly as an activity. Humboldt was the first to claim that codes or languages recorded in grammar books and dictionaries were only dead corpora (ergon), and that what really mattered was language as Thätigkeit – activity (energeia) (see Michon, 2010a, 2018b, chap. 7). Similarly, one and a half century later, Benveniste noticed that “we can never get back to man separated from language and we shall never see him inventing it [...] It is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man, and language provides the very definition of man” (Benveniste, 1974, p. 82). We will return below to this trend of thought because Morin joined again with it on some other significant points.

It also is striking to see how this dynamic premise concerning information led Morin—only a few years after the protest of 1968 during which those subjects had been widely discussed and also a few years before Jürgen Habermas' (1929-) Theory of Communicative Action (1981)—to envisage a new kind of community based on “love” and “communication,” provided naturally, he insisted, that the power of command and apparatuses was not underestimated.

Can we imagine, hope for an organization wherein communication commands, a community of communication? Let us already know here that all hope is silly if it ignores that, behind social communication, there is command by apparatuses, that is to say the link, hazy and unrecognized, between communication and enslavement. Let us also already know that it is in the development more and more existential and subjective of communication that this anthropo-social emergence becomes evident: love. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 256)

Communication could not be reduced to disembodied information. The opposition between the two concepts actually was much more than a mere theoretical point. It entailed a radical opposition between two kinds of society: one, authoritarian, based on command; the other, democratic, based on real communication and interaction. Information involved direct ethical and political stakes.

Informationism not only hides the Apparatus but contributes to every domination by the apparatus, and it can secrete as sociological ideal only an “informational” society, in which information, under the guise of rationality and functionality, commands communication. On the other hand, the complex vision of information leads us to hope for a communicational society, where information works for communication. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 371)

Critique of Communication Theory

After this critical examination of the cybernetic concept of information, Morin discussed its reduction since Shannon and Weaver (The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1949) by the ubiquitous theory of communication to “units of information called bits (binary digits).”

The coded message is transmitted, from the transmitter to the receiver, over the channel, under the form of signs or signals which we can break down into units of information called bits (binary digits). (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 305)

Here, it is worth noticing immediately how Morin started this new discussion by referring to the tale of Tristan and Isolde. He wittingly but quite adequately noted that “when, out of the infinite sea, a sail appears, white or black, the Shannonian observer will invoice: a bit!” More seriously, he underlined the fact that this theory could not give an account of poetry because it missed both the “meaning” or “significance” and “the originality and beauty of the poem.”

The bit is not a unit of meaning [une unité de sens]. Shannonian information is even totally deaf or blind to the significance [signification], quality, value, and importance of the information for the receiver. Isolde waits for the return of her Tristan [...] When, out of the infinite sea, a sail appears, white or black, the Shannonian observer will invoice: a bit! Here is a poem, “The Cassis River” [by Arthur Rimbaud]. It is an original assemblage of letters and words, complex therefore improbable in their succession, and it can be detailed in a total number of bits, equivalent to the number of decisions the receiver should make to identify the letters or words constituting the poem. However, such a tally tells us nothing about the meaning [sens] of the poem: the latter would carry the same quantity of information if the letters were arranged haphazardly, that is to say became pure noise. The quantity of information does not even give us an indication of the originality or beauty of the poem. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 307)

Starting this way was again rhythmologically significant for two reasons: it argued against the Shannonian theory of information by introducing two crucial aspects that had been at the heart of the poetic rhuthmic paradigm since Aristotle: meaning and artistic value, and it took poetry, that is, the most sophisticated use of language, as criterion for testing it. By so doing, Morin was now forcefully introducing poetic concerns that resumed with a trend that had been developing with contrasted results since the 18^th century (Michon, 2018b) and pointed to the recent upsurge of the Aristotelian poetic paradigm of rhythm in Meschonnic's work.

Therefore, this was no chance that Morin contrasted, a few pages below, the “digital insufficiency,” that is, the reduction of information to “discrete units,” the famous “binary digits,” and what he called the “‘continuous' dimension in information.” What we may call the rhuthmic aspect of meaning could not be digitalized, that is, reduced to a sheer succession of binary signals, because it entailed a certain “continuous dimension.” According to him, “all negentropic/informational activities obey[ed] a dialogic between digital and analog” (p. 319).

I think that the digital character, considered alone, reduces information to its “particle” aspect of discrete unit; it seems clear that there is also, complementary and antagonistic, a “continuous” dimension in information, which would be sort of “undulatory” in relation to the corpuscular aspect. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 318)

This point was again elaborated at the end of the book. Meaning was “rebellious to digital atomization.”

The engram, the code constitute discontinuous aspects which allow us to consider and manage units of information. Under this angle, information has only one aspect discontinuous, discrete, digital. Now, conceived in its relational activity, information takes on a continuous character and presents analogical/mimetic aspects quite rebellious to digital atomization. It is today with information as it was with light in the Newtonian era, where corpuscular character, alone conceived, excluded its undulatory character. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 350)

In a very clear and educational way, Morin went on by chronologically following the development of communication theory. He again criticized Wiener's “jumping on nascent information to integrate it in the universe of machines” (p. 309). Cybernetics, he repeated, abusively linked command to the communication of information (Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948). What still was, in Shannon's view, “an entity whose trade we organize between partners,” became with Wiener “organizing and ordering,” that is sheer matter of power (p. 309). The extraordinary “machines” composing the universe were thus compared and finally reduced to artifacts and the information to “program” and “command.”

The decisive introduction in 1953 of the concept of information into biology by Francis Crick (1916-2004) and James Watson (1928-) had contrasted consequences. It was both a “progress,” that allowed to get rid of purely mechanical as well as mystical conceptions of life, and an “obscuration at least equal to their virtue of elucidation” (p. 313). Since the reproduction of living beings depended on the sequences of nucleotides that composed the genes carried by the DNA macro-molecule, these sequences “could then be identified with a coded message” and “thenceforth assimilated into a program” (p. 313). Information could be reduced once again to its most simplistic concept generated during its communication and cybernetic debut.

By contrast, Morin remarked, information was introduced during the same period into physics by Léon Brillouin (1889-1969) in a very different way that underlined the self organizing power of “machines” (Science and Information Theory, 1956). Brillouin noticed that “the equation by which Shannon define[d] information coincide[d], but in reversed signs, with the Boltzmann-Gibbs equation defining entropy”, that is, there was a strict relation between entropy/negentropy and information measures (p. 310). The process of fighting disorder, noise, disorganization, varied in the same way as the efficiency of a “machine” in transmitting information.

This view was elaborated further by the biophysicist Henri Atlan (1931-) who emphasized at the beginning of the 1970s “the natural priority of negentropic organization over information,” in other words of self organizing machines or systems over communication (L'Organisation biologique et la Théorie de l'information, 1972). Negentropic system and information were linked but there was no symmetry between them: the former was a prior condition to the latter.

Atlan reestablishes the natural priority of negentropic organization over information: negentropy must first be transformed into information to then allow information to be transformed, elsewhere and differently, into negentropy. The equivalence information/negentropy is established at the heart of negentropic organization; [but] it signifies neither identity nor symmetry. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 311)

In these contributions, information was not considered as independent. It was part of negentropic process and the latter part of self organizing systems. A few pages below, Morin similarly mentioned “the antecedent and enveloping character of negentropic organization with respect to information” (p. 322).

To conceive information in its physical fullness, we must not only consider its interactions with energy and entropy; we must not only consider negentropy and information together; we must consider information, negentropy, and organization together, by incorporating information in negentropy and negentropy in organization. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 312)

Information was therefore fully “grounded in physics,” while pertaining, at the same time, to the most complex entities in nature. Viewed from this perspective, it bridged the divide between physical and human worlds, between the physical and the mind realms. It was the most powerful tool which allowed us to finally overcome the modern objectivist dualism that had been so many times criticized since the end of the 19^th century without never being entirely dismissed.

The physical citizenship of information is of considerable importance. Henceforth a relation in principle (I emphasize since the principle has not yet developed its potentialities and often even remains masked) establishes communication, scientifically, between what science imperatively disjoined until then: the realm of physics and the realm of the mind. Information grounds in physis what was looked for until then only in metaphysics, under the auspices of Idea or Mind. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 311)

Morin noted that the concept of information had also been used recently by some neuroscientists and even sociologists and had thus become, in the last two decades, “a notion which claim[ed] dominion over all things physical, biological, human.” But, due to the technical bias impairing its whole development, he rightfully added, it had been wrongly stripped of its “anthropo-social character.”

It intends henceforth to rule from entropy to anthropos, from matter to mind. [...] But a true link cannot be founded on an astounding scission, both effected and hidden by Shannonian theory, aggravated by the cybernetization of programmed information, between on the one hand the physical character of information, on the other its anthropo-social character. Triumphant information mutilated, unidimensionalized; it is the program of artificial machines. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 315)

This particular concept of information could not answer the most simple ethical and political questions. It was therefore “mutilating,” “reductionist” and covered a deep “authoritarianism” (p. 316).

Thus, information becomes a master-notion, a master-word. It is master of the energy which it manipulates, leashes, unleashes (but who manipulates information?). The program which rules the machine is king (where are man and society that wrote the program?) [...] Information rules society via norms, rules, interdicts (on condition of forgetting the relations of domination, exploitation, solidarity between the groups which determine the rules, norms, and interdicts as much as they are determined by them). (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 316)

Morin concluded his survey on communication theory by alerting against any physicalist reductionism. Since information was “always tied to negentropically organized beings,” i.e. living beings, information must be conceived simultaneously from the physical and the anthropo-sociogical perspectives. It could not be entirely reduced to physics.

There is, to our knowledge and on our planet, no extra-biological information. Information is always tied to negentropically organized beings which are the living beings and the metabiotic beings which feed on life (society, ideas). [...] We arrive at this key proposition: the physical concept of information is inconceivable without the biological concept of information and without the anthropo-sociological concept of information. We mutilate the reality of the physical concept if we claim to isolate it totally, since it exists only in physical beings which have the quality of being alive, and it develops its potentialities only in the communication between social beings having the cerebral aptitude to exchange information. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 321)

Consistently with the epistemological premises introduced in the first part of the book, Morin then underlined “the necessity of a theoretical mega-system” that integrated both physis, and life, and anthropo-sociology. Information and communication theory had to be elaborated from a much larger perspective than a sheer technical view induced whether from telecommunication or from computer techniques.

Whence the necessity of a theoretical mega-system, which, locating itself at the level of the triple articulation, integrates, transforms, and surpasses the concept of information born from Shannon. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 321)

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Edgar Morin and the Rhuthmoi of Information – Part 2

Pascal Michon — 2020-02-18T20:00:00Z

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Informational Model of Genetic Actualization of Life

This new perspective Morin called now “meta-informational,” that is to say, a perspective that “only develops if integrated, articulated, and ‘surpassed' [within the framework] of a complex theory of organization” (p. 322, my mod.). In order to reach higher level of complexity, communication theory needed to be grounded on the “generativity of information.” In other words, it was to be started from the observation of life.

To prove his case, Morin used first an evolutionary argument concerning the emergence of life. The extraordinary temporal distance—maybe more than a billion years—“between what we know about the start (the production of nucleotides and amino acids in laboratory “reconstitutions” of “primitive soup”) and what we know about the arrival (a unicellular procaryote having cytoplasm and genes inscribed in a RNA),” (p. 322) has often been explained by the extremely low probability that random encounters would end up in the combinatory association of large chemical assemblages (p. 323). But, Morin argued, this view resulted from “the atomizing paradigm which struggle[d] to conceive the assemblage of a grand mechanical game” and should rather be substituted with “a paradigm of active organization founded on the recursive, retroactive, negentropic properties of the loop producer-of-self” (p. 323). The former conception underestimated the possibility of “the very precocious upsurge of one or several organizations producers-of-self, of vortical form, and whose developments and mutual proto-symbiotic integrations would lead to a communicational-informational organization” (p. 323). Yet, based on the latest thermodynamics discovery by Prigogine, we should admit that the generative power of the physis was certainly greater than we thought. Therefore, information had most probably been, right from the start, part of the generative circuits that progressively produced the new beings.

From the moment we become aware that life cannot be born from the miraculous apparition of information, then we have to think that information is born of the complexification of a proto-biotic organization, which, thanks to this complexification, is going to be organized into life. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 323)

Morin then envisaged the continuation of the evolutionary process that spanned between the first informational loops that formed in proto-living beings “as soon as one agent (the base in RNA) [became] a signal for the other agent (enzyme), and conversely [...] in a dialectic of mutual engrammation term for term,” (p. 327) and the present human language—endowed with “double articulation.” The latter, he claimed, was only the latest and most complex result of the former. The universal “double articulation” of current human languages, discovered by André Martinet (1908-1999) (Éléments de linguistique générale, 1961), that is the twofold structure of the stream of speech, which could be primarily divided into meaningful signs (like words or “morphemes”), and then secondarily into distinctive elements (like letters or “phonemes”), had already emerged during the “biotization” period.

As hominization is a total process of ecological, genetic, organismic, cerebral, sociological transformation, a process of life style, with the creation and development of technology, of culture, in which the constitution of language with a double articulation is an aspect both total and partial of this process, so we must conceive “biotization” as a process of unheard of interferent developments, wherein arises the informational apparatus with double articulation. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 327, Morin's italics)

Indeed, “a phenomenon of saturation” of the response by the bases of RNA to the protein demand, combined with the “generative principle” involved in matter, had most probably brought this mere exchange of signals to a higher level of complexity by “constituting a meta-system with a double articulation” now able to support life development “ad infinitum.”

This first pre-informational double engrammation defends and fortifies the chemical machine. But, with the developments of complexification, the combinations between the bases of RNA are not numerous enough to respond to the protein demand and a phenomenon of saturation appears. [...] We can imagine, [like in the case of the origin of the double articulation of human language], a pressure for variety, emanating from phenomenal needs ever more varied and complex, by the trickery of proteins whose combinations can vary ad infinitum, on a restrained number of “saturated” bases which could respond to the increased needs only by constituting a meta-system with a double articulation, in which these bases, becoming the equivalent of the letters of an alphabet, will be able in their turn to be combined ad infinitum on the level of the second articulation. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 327)

This allowed Morin to articulate his information and communication theory with his previous individuation and self theory. Indeed, the very first emergence of this new system of communication resulted in the production of and was, at the same time, triggered by the materialization of auto-re-organizing machine-beings. In other words, living organization and information had inseparable origins.

The linkage of the double articulation in the early biotization processes and in the late human language allowed also Morin to ground again humanity in physis. Every existing living being and every species of living beings, whatever its level of complexity, was, according to him, the result of a common evolutionary, creative and complexifying information process.

It should be noted here that such claim was actually not completely consistent. It compared the differences between “a restrained number of ‘saturated' bases” with those between “the letter of an alphabet.” However, what Martinet had underlined (after the formative studies of the 19^th-century Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) and those of the Prague School during the inter-war period), was the universal existence of phonological differences that entailed phonemes, that is sounds. This fundamentally sonorous aspect of human language, that was to be put at the heart of his own rhuthmic theory by Henri Meschonnic, was completely disregarded by Morin. As we shall see, it was also criticized by Deleuze and Guattari who recalled the opposition of François Jacob to the assimilation of genetic code to a language.

But there was another problem that Morin, this time, was well aware of. This association had been most often interpreted in purely technical terms. The sequences of nucleotide bases inscribed in DNA were viewed as “messages formulated according to a code,” and “constituting the programs” that were driving ne varietur through “strictly stereotyped performances” the development of life (p. 329).

Instead, he suggested—coming back closer to the rhuthmic theorists of language—to consider that this automatic aspect was subordinated to a larger “strategic” behavior enabled by an “organizational competence.” The implementation of genetic messages could result in a range of behavior that was much larger and freer than expected.

The whole of a genome represents rather an organizational competence whence emanate strategies (plurality of behaviors developing and modifying themselves in function of random circumstances, in order to attain finalities). (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 330)

This “strategic” re-actualization of genetic messages was quite comparable to the use of “informational archives” during the “phenomenal existence” of living beings.

Informational archives constitute a memotheque from which the apparatus draws diversely according to the needs and problems signaled to it and which concern reorganizations, internal productions, behaviors, etc.; namely all phenomenal activities. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 330)

Moreover, it was also comparable with the process of rememoration in the brain: in both cases, DNA sequences or neuro-engrams did not contain the life-process implementation or the remembering of a memory-image but were only the starting points of re-creative processes addressing some phenomenal situation. A similar rhuthmic view was, as a matter of fact, to be expressed concerning the functioning of memory in the brain, at the end of the 20^th century, by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi (2000) (see Michon, 2011).

In both cases, the image [in memory] here, the [genetic] “model” there, are only present virtually. In both cases, there must be activity of the entire apparatus for the regeneration to take place; we have seen this in what concerns genetic information; in what concerns mental rememoration, there must be activity of the entire cerebral apparatus [...] For the engram does not contain the memory-image. The image is reformed at the time of the rememoration, when the psycho-cerebral set remembers, thanks to the engrammed outline. This memory is a resurrection or imaginary re-production of the event remembered, according to processes still unknown. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 335)

Informational Model of Ecological Actualization of Life

After having considered the informational living machines in their genetic actualization, Morin finally considered them in their eco-systems. Indeed communication was not only intra-organismic; it also entailed the whole ecological niche in which they lived. Since any living being, the unicellular included, “interpret[ed] events in the environment as signals, from the beginning there [was] geno-pheno-eco-communication” (p. 339).

At first very embryonic, communication with the exterior, eco-communication, is going to develop. Organisms more and more evolved, beings more and more cerebralized are going to discern more and more the events of an eco-system more and more diverse, and translate more and more events into information on nourishment, danger, etc. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 340)

This original “eco-communication” with the environment grew with the cerebralization into a “social communication” with the other individuals of the same species. The eco-systems thus became “extraordinarily complex communicational universes.”

With the apparition and development of sexual communication and social communication, the individuals themselves will emit signals to indicate their presence, to look for their partner or congener, to warn them of risks or chances which may befall. Social communication develops somewhat in all the evolutive branches and especially in insects, ants, termites, bees. The brain, epi-generative apparatus, real machine for capturing, storing, processing information, develops in vertebrates, fish, birds, mammals. Eco-systems, that is to say complex unities spontaneously organized starting from interactions between living beings populating an ecological nook (cf. v. II, ch. 1), become extraordinarily complex communicational universes. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 340)

In those eco-systems, the systems of communication “multipl[ied] and complexif[ied].” On the one hand, they used “sonorous, visual, chromatic, gestural, mimetic, ritual” means. On the other hand, they overcame their binary limitation to “incitation or inhibition” and “transmit[ted] calls, suggestions, alarms.”

The supports and systems of communication multiply and complexify. The signals emitted or exchanged are no longer only chemical, but sonorous, visual, chromatic, gestural, mimetic, ritual. Communication no longer has only a constraining value of incitation or inhibition; it also transmits calls, suggestions, alarms. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 340)

Ethologists have shown, Morin noted, that, due to the struggle for life, information became more and more “equivocal and ambivalent.”

As information becomes more and more grasped by the enemy becoming more and more intelligent, as the enemy extracts information from our trails, marks, odors, etc., to get a fix on us, then camouflage, lure, ruse develop conjointly with the art of detecting camouflage, lure, ruse. Information becomes henceforth equivocal and ambivalent. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 340)

The final result of this random but creative evolution of the bundle life/information through the individual, the species and the eco-system was the emergence of the “anthro-socio-noological” complex. According to Morin, the latter was mainly characterized by six major components:

1. Living beings with “a cerebral apparatus of unheard-of hypercomplexity, comprising more than twenty billion neurons, possessing an enormous memory, endowed with prodigious logical, constructive, imaginative, oniric potentialities.”

2. “A language with a double articulation” by virtue of which, associated with the aptitudes of the human mind, we can “construct ad infinitum very varied and complex noological edifices, narrations, discourses, mythologies, theories, ideologies, etc.”

3. “A culture” which “in the most archaic human societies” provides “a memotheque,” a collective memory of data concerning “the environment, the climate, fauna, flora, the world, man,” and “a genotheque,” a source of negentropy “furnishing information for all technical, practical, social, mythical operations,” that is know-how and rules, norms and interdicts “which govern the organization of society and are guides to codes or programs for individual and collective behavior.”

4. “The formidable rise of the State machine proper to the historical megasociety,” of “its dependent [apparatuses] (army, religion)” and of “local machines” such as banks, staffs of enterprises, trusts, holdings, political machines, party machines, etc.

5. “The development of urban agglomerations where the interplay of informational communication is effected in a more and more stochastic fashion” and in an ever increasing number of communication channels and practices.

6. A “noological sphere” or “set of spiritual phenomena” which in historical societies, i.e. endowed with State and cities, grew on top of the “memotheque” and the “genotheque.” This sphere was, according to Morin, the “ultimate avatar” of information and comprised “ideas, theories, philosophies, myths, phantasms, dreams” that were “beings of a new type, informational existents”. (pp. 342-347)

The last part of Morin's discussion of the concept of “information” was thus meant to top his previous survey of the role of information in the genetic and phenomenal aspects of life with an examination of its larger ecological dimension. It allowed to close the loop and propose a doctrine of information that was now organized as a whole.

1. Once cleared from the various types of technical reduction, information could become the master-concept that allowed to bridge physis, life, and socio-anthropological sphere.

Everywhere, with the living being, in eco-systems, in animal society, and finally in the anthropo-socio-noological universe, it is the same fundamental physical concept, and it is the same fundamental character: the potential equivalence between negentropy and information at the heart of or starting from geno-phenomenally organized beings. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 347-348)

2. Since information was proved to be common to all stages of the universe evolution, from the most simple biotic exchange of signals between molecules to the most complex social interactions and noological constructions, it could now support a general evolutionary model.

3. The study of the bundle information-and-life definitively proved that far from being limited to “communication of data,” information had a strong “generative aspect” that explained why it was tightly associated with the concepts of “negentropy” and “active organization.”

Information can be active and reproductive only within the activity of a generative apparatus. This generative apparatus can be active and reproductive only within the global activity of communicational organization. There is, therefore, not only interdependence, but recursive relation among information, apparatus, organization of the whole. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 349)

4. In order to fit with the requirement of the socio-anthropological sphere, it was also to be associated with the concept of “apparatus” that allowed to take into account its ethical and political side that was abusively disregarded by cybernetics and communication theory.

Let us repeat: we cannot conceive informational organization without referring to a generative apparatus. [...] The apparatus is the original arrangement which concentrates and capitalizes in itself memory, computation, programmation, elaboration of strategies of the organization of the whole inasmuch as whole; its aptitude to transform information into program, that is to say into action, centralizes in itself a power of organizational constraint. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 351)

After having briefly listed the successive stages of the informational building of individual and social apparatuses, Morin alluded to the example of the totalitarian regimes as controlling “all the means to express and communicate information,” monopolizing “true knowledge” and directly controlling “all apparatuses, economic and other.”

Every State power possesses programmer/computer power over society (power to rule, legislate, decree), strategic power (to elaborate and decide the policies to be followed) and power of command/control. The State called “totalitarian” goes farther: it concentrates in itself the official memory (the power to write the History of the past and to dictate the history of the present); the control of all the means to express and communicate information; the monopoly of true knowledge [Fr. savoir] at least in what concerns sociology and politics, possibly in matters of science and the arts; the direct control of all apparatuses, economic and other. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 352)

5. Interestingly, Morin finally shifted his critique, targeting this time social sciences, especially sociology, the discipline within which he had developed his thought hitherto. Indeed, the latter were also to blame, he rightfully noticed, for not taking into account information. Science of communication and social science had been for too long alienated from each other and should learn from each other's perspective. Morin accurately pointed towards the compartmentalization of modern science and research centers, a kind of new docta ignorantia—which had not even the excuse of looking for God.

This problematic [that of power] is doubly masked, both in its properly sociological basis and in its cybernetic organizational basis: sociological theory is unaware of communicational organization and informational power; cybernetics and information theory finally reveal the power of Information (information as “master of energy”), but in hiding the apparatuses, they hide the power of the apparatuses and power by the apparatuses. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 353)

Even Marx, who rightly “looked for what was generator in society,” had it wrong when, according to “the only foundation the physics of his time offered,” he reduced production to work and disregarded the productive power of information. Likewise, Marx had abusively focused on the only “power of class in society” without taking into account “the power of apparatuses” (p. 353). Marxism now appeared to Morin as a doctrine which had introduced some productive ideas but that was limited by believes typical from the 19^th century and that should be superseded by a larger theory based on the latest discoveries of science.

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Rhuthmos

Émile Benveniste and the Notion of Rhythm

The Rediscovery of the Notion of Rhuthmos

Critique of the Notion of Metron

Rhuthmos as a New Paradigm for the 21st Century

Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Subjectivity – Part 1

Language as Rhuthmic Basis of Subjectivation

The I as Empty Linguistic Form Filled by the Enunciation

Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Subjectivity – Part 2

The Emergence of the Subject in the Operation of the Enunciation Apparatus

The Mobility and Discontinuity of the Subject in the Flow of Language

Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Subjectivity – Part 3

Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Language – Part 1

In What Sense is Language in the Nature of Man?

Is Language a Transcendental Condition For Man?

Is Language a Hermeneutical Medium For the Being?

Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Language – Part 2

Is Language a Dialectical Medium For Man?

Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Language – Part 3

Is Language a Hermeneutical Medium For Man?

Is Language a Part of a Larger Pragmatic Order?

Émile Benveniste and the Rhuthmoi of Language – Part 4

Language as Rhuthmic Basis of a Radically Historical Anthropology

Edgar Morin and the Rhuthmoi of Information – Part 1

Critique of Cybernetics

Critique of Communication Theory

Edgar Morin and the Rhuthmoi of Information – Part 2

Informational Model of Genetic Actualization of Life

Informational Model of Ecological Actualization of Life

Rhuthmos as a New Paradigm for the 21^st Century