Experience of Language, Language of Experience

I want to develop a thought I had while reading Daniel Dor's marvellous book on linguistics, The Instruction of Imagination. This is more a blog-style post than a post suited for the forum, but a ready-made audience is always nice, if anyone can be bothered to follow this the whole way through.

The Particularity of Thinking-for-Speaking

So: The book basically proposes a whole new approach to language, but the one claim I want to focus on is its take on the relationship between speech and thought, and what that relationship can teach us about thought in general. The gist of it is that for Dor, when we think-for-the-sake-of-speech or rather, when we think with the aim of communicating-in-language in mind, we think in a very particular way (i.e. not in a general way - this distinction between particular and general will be important later on).

This particularity has to do with the fact that with language, according to Dor, the aim is to put someone else in the same frame of mind as you: to get the other person to imagine what you have experienced (and that they cannot). For example, if you've seen a dog, and the dog is no longer present in front of both you and your discussion partner, and you want to talk about the dog, then, in describing the dog to the other person, what you're doing is 'instructing their imagination'; you're getting them to imagine what cannot otherwise be experienced (by the other person).

For Dor, language's primary role is thus in bridging what he calls experiential gaps. Language is a bridge - albeit an imperfect and provisional one - between two agents of experience (one who has seen the dog in all its fluffy, analog glory, and one who hasn't). And although language cannot obviously make those experiences coincide, it can do just enough to fulfil whatever pragmatic function telling someone else about the dog might have (perhaps our two people are primitive hunter-gatherers, and they want to hunt and eat the dog).

The important point in all of this is that this means that when we think-for-the-sake-of-speaking/communication, we think in a particular and hence not general way: because language is ultimately a matter of 'instructing the imagination', to think-for-speaking forces us to attend to some elements of experience over other elements of experience that might matter more in other contexts (contexts where I'm not trying to communicate). In experiencing the dog as it wonders past, I get the 'full experience' of its gait, the way its fur swings, the brightness of its eyes, etc, etc, all as an 'integral' experience; in communicating this experience, I'm forced to cull - as I have done - the 'full experience' into a limited set of communicable ones, suitable for language (gait, fur, eyes, etc).

Thus, thinking-for-speaking means that there is also a correlative 'experiencing-for-instructing', as Dor calls it: to the degree that we speak in order to instruct the imagination of the other, language also influences, in certain, defined, circumstances how it is that we experience: "Speakers must be able to pay attention to those components and properties of their experiences that are required by their language’s norms, those elements that were highlighted and signified by their communities as experiential commonalities, for use in instructive communication". The crucial thing - and this is why Dor is not a 'linguistic relativist' - is that 'experiencing-for-instructing' does not exhaust the range of experience we can have of the world: it occupies only a particular slice of it: the slice in which we aim to communicate with others.

On the basis of all of this, Dor thus proposes that 'experiencing-for-instructing' is a particular kind of experiencing, and not a general one. And it follows from this that "every speaker lives in two worldviews at the same time, one for knowing and one for speaking — the first privately experienced, the other [linguistically] constructed."

All Experiencing is Experiencing-For

Now, while I only have a small quibble with respect to Dor's account of language (see below), I do think his account of experience is under-theorized (which makes sense, he's a linguist after all, and his object of analysis is language, not experience). The issue I see is the all-too-simple duality between 'private' experience and 'public linguistic activity'. For Dor, 'private experience' is holistic and richly integrated, while language only works with particular bits of this integral whole. What I want to put into question is the idea that this integral whole exists at all; or rather, what I want to argue is that all experiencing and all thinking is experiencing-for-X or thinking-for-X, and there is no such thing as 'thinking in general' or 'experiencing in general'.

Thus, beside and together with experiencing-for-instructing might lie, say, experiencing-for-walking or experiencing-for-driving, experiencing-for-dancing, and experiencing-for-computing - and so on; each of which brings out certain aspects of the world at the expense of others. These experiences-for should not be understood as mutually exclusive - I might be driving while having a conversation, say - and instead should be understood more as intensities or attractors which can co-mingle and vary along with each other. In fact, to follow an expression from the semiotician Brian Rotman, one can say that all thought and all experience only ever takes place in an 'ecology of thought' or 'ecology of experience' according to which one must "integrate into a single ecology the mix of talking, imagining, gesturing, symbolizing, drawing, and eye-scanning found to be present" in different kinds of activity (Rotman, "Gesture in the Head").

At stake in this is an attempt to 'de-idealize' thought and experience: to say that there is no such thing as thinking or experiencing-in-general is to deny that thought and experience can exist or get off the ground without, as it were, something in the world to mobilize it, to set it off in a certain direction. It is thus a radically anti-Cartesian idea. Heidegger came close to a similar idea when he spoke of being as always 'being-in-the-world'; but, like Dor, Heidegger's 'world' always struck me as too holistic and too untextured for my liking. It is too general, and not specific enough.

Another way to understand this is as a radical reformulation of the phenomenological doctrine of intentionality; where for phenomenology, thought is always thought-of-X, the idea here is the experience is not merely 'of' something, but for something. It ties a closer knot - if it can even be called a knot - between experience and that which it is experience-for. The philosopher Erin Manning, with a slight change of vocabulary, speaks instead of a 'thinking-with', according to which all thinking (and feeling, and moving, etc, etc) is thinking-with (or feeling-with, moving-with, etc etc). If we keep in mind the idea of an experiencing-for-dancing, here is how Manning describes a thinking-with-movement in the act of dance:

"What dance gives us are techniques for distilling from the weave of total movement a quality that composes a bodying in motion... a thinking that composes-with movement, with-body-in-the-making. ... A thinking because the doing resonates with thought. To move is to think-with a bodying in act" (Manning, Always More Than One). So to come back to Dor, the point is that while Dor is right that language forces thought to think in a certain, particular way, this particularity is not to be distinguished from some kind of overarching 'experience in general', but from a whole host inter-mingling experiencings-for or experiencings-with of which the 'experiencing-for-instructing' of communication is just one.

Closing note on Language

To come back though, to Dor on language, one obvious objection is that language is quite obviously not just for 'instructing the imagination'. We also insult, affirm, deny, console, lord-over, love, bond, promise, fight, hurt, repose-in, and threaten with language. All I want to say is that none of this is incompatible with Dor's account. What I think Dor gets right is that language probably developed for the 'instruction of imagination' and was ex-apted for uses other than the one it was originally (chronologically) 'devised' for. Anyway, I'm more interested in the question of experience and thought here, but thought I would add this to head-off a rather obvious and glaring objection that might be thrown this way.