Читать книгу German as Contact Zone - Russell West-Pavlov - Страница 22

The first objection (which, for the sake of clarity, I divide into two parts) pertains to the patently self-referential, indeed solipsistic character of Kohn’s argumentation. The procedure by which this mode of self-reference—which is also a performative exclusion—operates, is illustrated by Kohn’s statement that ‘I am now in a position to account for the sense of separation … that the symbolic creates’ (ibid: 54). The symbolic creates difference that is then in turn fed back into an assertion of difference, which in turn is recorded in the symbolic, with the latter becoming a mirror in Lacan’s sense of the word, the basis for an Imaginary sense of self-as-separate from the world. The ‘symbol’, ‘I’, founds itself in calling upon its own symbolic character to ‘account’ (retrospectively, and retroactively, as if gazing back at something that pre-existed it) for the very separation that its symbolic character has created.

Kohn performs here an operation that is mgnificently tautological. He draws a broad distinction between humans and the nonhuman world, despite his nominal provincialization of language, on the basis of the symbolic function of language—the only aspect of language that is truly loosed from an attachment to things. But the autonomy of language that defines humans is in fact predicated upon that which it founds. Autonomous humans wield autonomous language which defines autonomous humans who wield autonomous language … and so on, ad infinitum. Symbolic language thus founds a tautological structure that is as closed in upon itself as the self-justifying structure of human sovereignty that Kohn defends via language—circular, self-referential, impervious to interrogation from outside its charmed circle of self-assurance. This in itself is remarkably problematic as the core operation of a closely argued scholarly work that claims to unseat the human from its throning position over the creation.

A further point to make in this respect necessitates a more systematic—and systemic—analysis of Kohn’s rhetoric. What Kohn rehearses resembles a narrative performance of the mechanism of meaning-production analyzed by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. Such mechanisms depend upon the fundamental differentiations that underpin what Luhmann calls social semantics:

Am Anfang steht … nicht Identität, sondern Differenz. Nur das macht es möglich, Zufällen Informationswert zu geben und damit Ordnung aufzubauen; denn Information ist nichts anderes als ein Ereignis, das eine Verknüpfung von Differenzen bewirkt—a difference that makes a difference. (Luhmann 1984: 112; English in original, quoting Bateson )

[Thus one begins not with identity but with difference. Only thus can one give accidents informational value and thereby construct order, because information is nothing more than an event that brings about a connection between differences—a difference that makes a difference. (Luhmann 1995: 75)]

An inaugural act of demarcation between inside and outside, between self and other, between system and environment, which however, in itself is invisible, offers nothing more than a starting point for differential meaning-making. We need, effectively, a distinction in order to observe a distinction (Reese-Schäfer 1992: 72-3). Thus we need a second-order act of observation to operationalize the originary distinction. The latter allows us to get started, but not, as it were, to go anywhere. Luhmann notes,

Es [das Subjekt] kann nur sehen, was es mit dieser Unterscheidung sehen kann. Es kann nicht sehen, was es nicht sehen kann. (Luhmann 1992: 85)

[The subject can only see what it can see with the aid of this distinction. It cannot see what it cannot see.]

The second-order observation is an observation of an observation. This second-order act is simultaneously a description and an inscription, which in turn calls forth re-inscriptions—again and again. The system is not a stable state, but depends upon constant re-assertions of its constitutive borders. The system is a performative, one that self-produces in the act of declaring the substance of its own conditions of possibility. Kohn’s own formulation of the symbolic is of course itself such a statement, not only because it declares the existence of a fundamental separation in the very act of describing the conditions of that separation, but because it also stresses the difference inaugurated by the medium of the Symbolic in the medium of the Symbolic.

It is hardly a coincidence by chance that what we witness here is the self-inauguration of a system that is, in the last analysis, ungrounded. The difference is not a pre-existing fact of nature. Rather, the difference created by language must be asserted via a language of difference. In bringing something into existence in act of futurity, the inaugural act conceals its inaugural status by claiming that what it has created has always existed, thereby grounding and legitimizing its claims. Yet these claims are patently false: the statement is self-legitimizing.

There are further comments that need to be made regarding this structure so as to place it in a broader historical context and thus to identify the surprisingly wide-reaching implications of Kohn’s thinking.