Art and Language

Extract from 'Art and Language Proceedings'

Philip Pilkington, Michael Baldwin, Dave Rushton, Chris Smith

from Audio Arts Issue: Vol. 1, No. 1, 1973

Transcript

In the first issue of Audio Arts members of Art & Language are heard in discussion. The listener can eavesdrop as the group explore themes, theories and preoccupations. In the following extract Michael Baldwin starts the proceedings by exploring the parameters and assumptions underlying meaning and function in linguistic discourse.

Michael Baldwin What is it that we are going to regard as normal? Let’s assume we want to ‘catch’ a lot of discourse. What are we going to regard as discourse to be caught, and what are we going to regard as discourse to be rejected or eliminated? One can only really do that on the basis of saying that inside the system there are going to be kinds of feeling, or kinds of pragmatic parameters, developed or envisaged; so it’s like people finding themselves saying, ‘I’m not listening to this rubbish’, and presumably finding the relations between these is again of some small significance.

But Philip [Pilkington], for example, has been dealing with an idea where he’s been taking a piece of discourse which already works out a number of points of reference associated with it, then trying to work out what could be sorted out from there as a point of reference of some discourse, whether it be thinking or dreaming, or whatever one does. There are ways in which one exercises one’s discourse – there are certain one-sided conversations, for example, that take place. One of the characteristics of our social sphere is, I would say, the one-sided conversation – and I don’t mean one-sided in any axiological sense: I mean one-sided in the sense where you often find you have a kind of infant/adult situation, which shifts and changes quite rapidly. It’s infant/adult in the sense that would raise a standpoint as to bi-linguistics, to the extent that people tend to give up speaking coherently. It tends to be a bit like someone putting specific constraints or tolerances onto another person, and then there arrives someone who puts those into productive or non-productive or tolerant or permissive. The hearer is a recipient of this, and that is often reversed when a hearer becomes a speaker.

Now, there’s that sort of factual statement that is particularly characteristic of the way our discourse goes and not necessarily characteristic of the way that all apparently normal discourse goes – and certainly not of the way academic discourse goes on. There’s that, I think, which is to do with context, and I am certainly not sure about what context is. There’s this business of context in general, where all ends up with a situation such that to deal with context people would argue that one got on a regress. But I would argue against most of the people who would say, ‘Ah well, don’t worry about it, because you end up with regress’. I would have said a) there’s linguistic content which isn’t involved in regress, and b) however, is it not the case that the regress that one gets involved in, when considering context, is a function of the epistemology which will allow you talk in terms of a model, if you like, of all human knowledge; so the concept is that all human knowledge is accessible to you – in other words, it’s an epistemologically relative concept, the concept of an epistemological regress, if you see what I mean. To what degree is it possible to introduce, if you like, the concept of interpretation which, if you like, is capable of noticing a revision on the idea of regress associated with completed contexts of interpretation? That, I think, is a bona fide activity in the context of something that is as absurd as an art world or something like that, simply because it is a world in which one takes seriously the question of what do we now do, given the high instrumentality, fictiveness, operationality, so on and so forth, and no scientific series, etcetera, etcetera.

It takes into account, if you like, the idea of one’s study being intensive as distinct from extensive – intensive meaning looking into almost as many parts or looking for as many positively generalisable statements as possible about one’s discourse as one can, which involves considering all one’s discourse, but of course most of all what one considers is arbitrary fragments of one’s discourse to that end. Now, whether it is arbitrary fragments or whether in fact there is one way in which there is an ordering in the way these things are selected, for example, is critical. One of the things that is interesting is, well, here we are with nothing to do, hardly anyone to talk to … what then is our position? Do you know what I mean? That as a sociological fact is something which makes one’s situation very interesting, it seems to me. Here we are, sitting on our own with no visible means of support, no visible activity of a kind which we would generally regard as purposive, no production of discourse which one would generally regard as purposive discourse, yet that might lead to function, think, work, etcetera; and what do I do?

Are you making assumptions about that? What you are doing in this context? The context of conversation can be in some way transposed or mapped onto the other context [ … ]