Insightful Remarks and Observations
1 Linguistics
1.1 General
1.1.1 Conservatives, Won’t You Ditch the Prescriptive Grammar?
“It seems clear that knowledge of grammatical rules is an essential
component of the interactive competence that speakers must have to
interact and cooperate with others. Thus if we can show that individuals
interacting through linguistic signs are effective in cooperating with
others in the conduct of their affairs, we have prima facie evidence for
the existince of shared grammatical structure. One need not as the
nineteenth-century normative grammarians did, and many modern educators
continue to do, attempt to judge an individual’s basic linguistic
ability in reference to an a priori set of grammatical standards.” –
Gumperz, 
Discourse
Strategies, p. 19.
1.2 Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics
1.2.1 Motivating Interactional Sociolinguistics
“There is a need for a sociolinguistic theory which accounts for the communicative functions of linguistic variability and for its relation to speakers’ goals without reference to untestable functionalist assumptions about conformity or nonconformance to closed systems of norms. Since speaking is interacting, such a theory must ultimately draw its basic postulates from what we know about interaction.” – Gumperz, Discourse Strategies, p. 29.
1.2.2 Goffman on Systems-Contraints and ritual-Contraints
Goffman makes between “systems-constraints and ritual-constraints,
where the first labels the ingredients essential to more than on party,
and the second those ingredients that, while not essential to the
maintaining of interaction, are nevertheless typical of it – they are …
the social dimensions of interaction.” – Levinson,
Pragmatics,
p. 44.
1.2.3 On Language Change
“A trait that is only loosely connected and essentially free-floating can be superseded very quickly,” Kroeber says (as quoted by Weinreich, p. 6).
1.3 Semantics and Philosophy of Language
1.3.1 Counterpoint: The Logicians Are Certifiable!
Dostoyevsky’s challenge to logical semantics: “And, to sum the whole
thing up, why are you so certain that not flying in the face of
his real, normal interests, certified by the deductions of reason and
arithmetic, is really always for his good and must be a law for all
mankind? After all, for the time being it is only your supposition. Even
if we assume it as a rule of logic, it may not be a law for all mankind
at all. Perhaps you think I’m mad, gentlemen?” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Notes From
Underground, trans. Jessie Coulson (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books,
1972), p. 39. Italics in original.
1.3.2 Searle Extending Wittgenstein
John Searle, in “Proper Names,” develops what he sees as Wittgenstein’s analysis into a theory, encapsulated in his suggestion that “it is a necessary fact that Aristotle has the logical sum, inclusive disjunction, of properties commonly attributed to him: any individual not having at least some of these properties could not be Aristotle.”
1.4 Marxism and Language
1.4.1 “Language” Is Constructed from Language
“All categories, including the category ‘language,’ are themselves constructions in language, and can thus only with an effort, and within a particular system of thought, be separated from language for relational inquiry.” – Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 21.
1.4.2 Activity and History
“The key moments which should be of interest to Marxism, in the development of thinking about language, are, first, the emphasis on language as activity and, second, the emphasis on the history of language.” – Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 21.
1.4.3 Plato’s Solution in Cratylus as the Foundation of Idealist Thought
“Plato’s major inquiry into language (in the Craylus) was centered on the problem of the correctness of naming, in which the interrelation of ‘word’ and ‘thing’ can be seen to originate either in ‘nature’ or in ‘convention’.” Plato’s solution was in effect the foundation of idealist thought: There is an intermediate but constitutive realm, which is neither ‘word’ nor ‘thing’ but ‘form,’ ‘essence,’ or ‘idea.’ The investigation into either ‘language’ or ‘reality’ was then always, at root, an investigation of these constitutive (metaphysical) forms.” – Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 22.
2 Media Criticism
2.1 Problems Can Only Be Solved in Depth
“The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be
solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions.” –
Wittgenstein, 
Culture
and Value, p. 74e, in a remark that has implications both for the
individual and for society, the latter of which can be seen when the
remark is applied to the current state and content of the mass media in
the United States.
2.2 The Protesters Aren’t People
“Where a reporter stands in relation to a confrontation in the street …” … “The normal situation of the camera and reporter is behind the police who are dealing with pickets or demonstrators. This puts the viewer in a situation where he or she too is invited to see them as objects; the viewer is, as it were, identified with this position.” – Raymond Williams, On TV, p. 209-210.
2.3 Disinherited by Censorship
“Even so far as men have not yet succumbed to political delusion, the mechanism of censorship–both internal and external–will deprive them of the means of resistance.” – Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. ix.
2.4 Madness and Civilization
Foucault, in the preface to Madness and Civilization, writes that “in
the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates
with the madman: on one hand the man of reason delegates the physician
to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract
universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates
with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason
which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of
the group, the requirements of conformity.” – Foucault, Michel.
Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), p. x.
2.5 Contributors Must Have Control
“The right kind of organization, for any cultural institution” – including newspapers, publishing houses, and television stations – “is one based on control by the contributors.” –Raymond Williams, the British sociologist and literary critic, in his book Communications.
3 Philosophy
3.1 Baudrillard on the Spectacle of Brain
“All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.
“Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other – fatal – moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. … A spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen.” – Jean Baudrillard, America (Verso: 1988), p. 36.
3.2 Wittgenstein Disperses the Fog
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in attempting to unravel problems in the
philosophy of language, exhorts the reader of Philosophical
Investigations to view the phenemena in a its primitive state. “It
disperses the fog,” Wittgenstein says, “to study the phenomena of
language in primitive kinds of application in which one can command a
clear view of the aim and functioning of the words.” –
Philosophical
Investigations, Section 5.
3.3 Tocqueville on the Role of Associations
Tocqueville gives great importance to the role associations play in democracy. Of the United States, he writes: “The most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have, in our time, carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes.” – Vol. 2, p. 107.
4 Psychology
4.1 Freud on Dreams as Communication
For Freud, dreams are a form of communication, with signs and symbols, a system of language all their own: “Even this unintelligible dream must be a fully valid psychical, with sense and worth, which we can use in analysis like any other communcation.” – Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1965), p. 11.
4.2 Piaget on the Art of Persuasion
“The art of discussion … consists principally in knowing how to place oneself at the point of view of one’s partner in order to try to convince him on his own ground.”– Jean Piaget. Comments on Vygotsky’s Critical Remarks Concerning The Language and Thought of the Child, and Judgment and Reasoning in the Child (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1962), p. 5.
4.3 Parental Love Drives Obedience to Law
“Obedience to the laws of civilization is first inspired, not by fear or prudence, Freud tells us, but by love, love for those early powerful figures who first demand obedience. Obedience, of course, does not exorcise aggression; it merely directs it against the self. There is becomes a means of self-domination, infusing the voice of conscience with the hostility that cannot be aimed at the ‘unattackable authority.’” – Jessica Benjamin, 1988, p. 5.
4.4 Prozacian Workers Support High-Tech Capitalism
“Observing responses to Prozac,” Kramer writes, “we learn not only about ourselves but about our island’s culture. … The success of Prozac says that today’s high-tech capitalism values … confidence, flexibility, quickness, and energy” – Kramer, Listening to Prozac, p. 297. Cf. Brown’s view of capitalism as rewarding conformist character, p. 297.
5 Reading, Writing, Working, Loving
5.1 Roland Barthes’ Phenomenological Contact with the Text
“I work every day from 9:30 am to 1 p.m.; this regular workaday
schedule for writing suits me better than an aleatory schedule, which
supposes a state of continual excitement. … What I do enjoy is the
excitement provoked by immediate and phenomenological contact with the
tutor text. … I’m content to read the text in question, in a rather
fetishistic way: writing down certain passages, moments, even words
which have the power to move me. As I go along, I use my cards to write
down quotations, or ideas which come to me, and they do so, curiously,
already in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things
are already taking on an existence as writing. … From then on, I’m
plunged into a kind of frenzied state. I know that everything I read
will somehow find its inevitable way into my work. The only problem is
to keep what I read for amusement from interfering with reading directed
toward my writing. The solution is very simple: the books I read for
pleasure, for example a classic, or one of Jakobson’s books on
linguistics, which I particularly enjoy, those I read in bed at night
before going to sleep. I read the others at my worktable in the morning.
… The bed is the locus of irresponsibility. The table, that of
responsibility.” – Roland Barthes,
The Grain of the
Voice, pp. 180-181.
5.2 The Solitude of the Lover’s Discourse
“The lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techniques, arts). Once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the ‘unreal,’ exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an affirmation.”– Barthes. Lover’s Discourse. Emphasis in original. p. 1.
6 Literature
6.1 Identity and Resistance in The Castle
6.1.1 The Secret in the Object
“The Castle is perhaps a theology in action, but it is first of all the individual adventure of a soul in quest of its grace, of a man who asks of this world’s objects their royal secret and of women the signs of the god that sleeps in them,” Camus writes about Kafka’s novel in The Myth of Sisyphus.1 In The Castle, “the details of everyday life stand out, and yet in that strange novel in which nothing concludes and everything begins over again, it is the essential adventure of a soul in quest of its grace that is represented.”2
K. finds that grace, at least for a fleeting moment or two, in the humanity and in the brief moments of understanding that he shares first with the Barnabas girl, then with Frieda, and finally – in a Modern twist, to begin again near the novel’s end – with Pepi. Each of the women is in fact pivotal in everything beginning again.
6.1.2 Identity at the Margins
Marginality and
identity also play their roles in the matrix of resistance in The
Castle: K. “is an average European. He is like everybody
else.”3 But he is also unlike anybody else in the village. He
is an outsider, a marginalized figure unable to understand the
unfamiliar norms that he bumps up against with his every social act –
norms which at times bring forth acts of outright resistance from K.
Indeed, in The Castle, K. is like the Underground Man, like the
marginalized Golyadkin in The Double: He at once feels his marginality
but continues to seek acceptance in society.
It is through the relationships of love or friendship that K. builds with Frieda, the Barnabas woman, and Pepi that K. finds both the inspiration for resistance, manifested in his “freedom of manner,”4 to the village’s mores as well as the beginnings of assimilation into its society.
Notes
1. Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus. p. 126.
2. Camus. Myth. p. 129.
3. Ibid. p. 129. Camus.
4. Ibid. p. 130. Camus.