1. Archeological & Anthropological
Critical Interventions
G. Thomas Goodnight
September 11, 2012
Metaphors for Discourse

2. Early American Communication
Democracy Identity

3. Kant
Cassirer
Langer
Symbolists
Mind has forms. Practical de-ontology
Mind emerges myth to symbolic form.
Art is virtual performance of form.
Modern
Thinking
Animal symbolicum
Language, myth, art, and science are
symbolic forms richly grown from biological beginnings.

4. Myth, Metaphor and Language
 Is myth a corruption of experience by substituting words
that forget steps in the arrival of a sensuous truth?
 “even the most primitive verbal utterance requires a
transmutation of a certain cognitive or emotive experience
into sound, i.e., into a medium that is foreign to the
experience, and even quite disparate; just as the simplest
mythical form can arise only by virtue of a transformation
which removes a certain impression from the realm of the
ordinary, the everyday and profane, and lifts it to the level
of the ‘holy,’ the sphere of mythico-religious ‘significance.’
Cassirer, 88
 Meaning is the product of focusing light on a subject, but
the unmarked myth diffuses light. In the “ideational realm
f myth and language there are always, besides those
locations from which the strongest light proceeds, others
that appear wrapped in profoundest darkness.” 1. The law
of leveling and extinction of specific differences. Whole
imminent in parts. 2. The law of participation and
generation. The parts become transcended by the whole.
Relevance as a “momentary god.”

5. Modern Culture Wars Begin
MATTHEW ARNOLD C. P. SNOW
“Dover Beech” elite genius vs. mass
imitation
“Two Cultures” Science versus the Arts
1822-1888 1905-1980

6. HANNAH ARENDT
1906-1975
From ‘good society’ of enlightened individuals
to le peuple of the French Revolution.
Mass society is made possible by leisure. The
crowd is analogous to human condition of
mass society. Loneliness, flexibility,
excitability, lack of standards, consumption,
flabby judgment, egocentricity and “fateful
alienation from the world.”

7. HANNAH ARENDT
Nostalgia is a temptation for those who resist
mass culture by connecting with good society
elites of the past. On the other hand mass
society “wants not culture but
entertainment” to pass away vacant time
seizing a hiatus in the ‘metabolism of man
with nature.’” Arendt, 349 Consumption is
“devouring” at an increasing rate to fill vacant
time.
Vita Activa / Vita Contempliva
Private Life & Public Life
“the thread of tradition is broken, and we must discover the past for ourselves—that is, read its authors as though nobody had ever read them before.” Arendt348
Philistinism is cultural value, half-baked.
the threats are not the elites but those who organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects” to make them palatable to masses. These
“digesters, re-writers and changers of cultures” Arendt, 351.

8. PALIGENESIS
 “Especially in the magic realm, word magic is everywhere
accompanied by picture magic. The image, too, achieves
its purely representative, specifically ‘aesthetic’ function
only as the magic circle with which mythical consciousness
surrounds it is broken, and it is recognized not as a
mythico-magical form, but as a particular sort of
formulation.” Cassirer 98
 “If language is to grow into a vehicle of thought, an
expression of concepts and judgments, this evolution can
be achieved only at the price of forgoing the wealth and
fullness of immediate experience. In the end, what is left is
merely a bare skeleton.” Cassirer 98
 Paligenesis “at once a sensuous and a spiritual
reincarnation. This regeneration is achieved as language
becomes an avenue of artistic expression. Here it recovers
the fullness of life; but it is no longer a life mythically bound
and fettered, but an aesthetically liberated life.” Cassirer 98
“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: - Do I wake or do I sleep?”
Keats Ode to a Nightingale

9. HANNA ARENDT &
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
“Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of
the world; entertainment relates to people and is a
phenomenon of life. If life is no longer content with
the pleasure which is always coexistent with the toil
and labor inherent in the metabolism of man and
nature…then life may reach out for the things of the
world, may violate and consume them.” Arendt, 352.
“Culture can be safe only with those who love the
world for its own sake…” Arendt, 354.
Cultura—colere “to take care of and
And preserve and cultivate.” 353
authenticity

10. LEO LOWENTHAL &
C. WRIGHT MILLS
Despite a surfeit of new technology, “we are
lonelier that ever before—and certainly our
common human need for world peace seems
further removed than ever.” p. 335
More = Less Why?

11. Mass Media Fueled by Social Science: Critique
 “Communication has been almost
completely divested of its human
content, a content suggested by the
word itself. For true communication
entails a communion, a sharing of
innermost experience. The
dehumanization of communication has
resulted from its annexation by the
media of modern culture” as written up
by social scientists. p. 336
 “Mass communication relies upon the
ideological sanction of individual
autonomy in the very process of
exploiting individuality to serve mass
culture.” p. 336

12. EZRA POUND “(WHO IN SPITE OF HIS
ABBERATIONS, RETAIN THE STATURE OF THE
POET AND THE HUMANIST).”
“As language becomes the most powerful
instrument of perfidy, so language alone can
riddle and cut through the meshes. Used to
conceal meaning, used to blur meaning, used
to produce the complete and utter inferno of
the past century…against which, SOLEY a care
for language, for accurate registration of
language avails.” p. 339
As one speaks, so he is. Seneca
But does language cure loneliness?
What is the word to the crowd?

13. Anthropology of Communication
 1. Concerned with language as a historical product and a ‘department’ of
culture, where communication is related to “process and event.”
 2. Saussure structuralist formalism. Sapir concern with “use of language in
personality, in maintenance of social roles, in abuse and derogation, in
poetry, in drum and other instrumental communication.” Hymes, 3
 3. American stress functionalism which opposes cognitive versus expressive
approaches to language in the process and practices of communication.
 4. Synchrony identifies structure of language as form. Diachrony investigates
its divergence in use, change over time, and use over and against multiple
codes making up regional communication.

14. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
 “The Sapir-Whorf theory, named after the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, is
a mould theory of language. Writing in 1929, Sapir argued in a classic passage that:
 “’Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily
understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression
for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language
and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The
fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the
group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The
worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached...
We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community
predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir 1958 [1929], p. 69)’”
 “This position was extended in the 1930s by his student Whorf, who, in another widely cited passage, declared that:
 “’We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the
world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world
is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by
the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do,
largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our
speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and
unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization
and classification of data which the agreement decrees. (Whorf 1940, pp. 213-14; his emphasis)’”
 http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/whorf.html

15. Anthropological Inquiry
 What constitutes the function efficiency of communicative use of language
in society?
 How does language mark hierarchy and preserve order within social
practices and customs of usage?
 What distinguishes (insect, fish, bird, warm-blooded)from early hominid
from fully human communication?
 What are paralinguistic forms of communication—and how do analog and
digitally formed communication work together and apart?
 How do ethnographers recognize cultural differences in kinesics?
 How do communicative modalities and events emerge, sort, and change?

16. Communication Enclosed and Escaped
 “Communication is the basic metaphor for the human interpretation of
experience, and anything may count as communicative, if a person takes it as so.
Not everything is so taken.”
 “The difficulties of determining the boundaries to communication in a
community do not justify ignoring them.” Hymes, 18
 Anthropology is concerned with “the growth and spread, the attrition and
decline, of systems of shared meanings manifest in cultural objects, and with the
dynamics of their use in personal lives.” Hymes, 19.
 An anthropological approach regards communication in society as problematic.
Ethnography discovers patterns in actual communities.
 Intrapersonal? Dreams? Myths? Artistic transformation?
 *Critical Communication Inquiry studies the discovered and undiscovered
boundaries of communication for a time and place, a way of being, for human
beings as finite in time.

17. Sunset?
Ritual confirms meaningful reading as communication.

18. An Ethnographic Approach to Communication
 “1. What are the communicative events, and their components, in a
community?
 2. What are the relationships among them?
 3. What capabilities and states do they have, in general, and in particular
events?
 4. How do they work?” Hymes, 25.
 The thrust of such work is to see how signs as codes are transmogrified into
messages that serve as symbols thereby generating a Communicative Event.
 “The concept of message is taken as implying the sharing (real or imputed) of (1) a code (or codes) in terms of which a message
is intelligible to (2) participants, minimally an addressor and addressee (who may be the same person), in (3) an event
constituted by transmission of the message, and characterized by (4) a channel or challenges, (5) a setting or context, (6) a
definite form or shape to the mssage, and (7) a topic and comment, (the message says something about something).” Hymes,
25-26.

19. HANS BLUMENBERG
An Anthropological Approach studies communicative
events to appreciate:
1. The significance of overlooked forms across
temporal dynamics and cultural roles.
2. The interchanges between universal attributions
generated from local metaphors.
3. The language of symbolic spheres as they fuel
practice, expand and connect.
4. The enduring but varying attributions of
communication that are taken for granted as
legitimate.
1920 - 1996
Critical Communication Inquiry
as appreciative intervention.

20. The lack of fixed biological dispositions
 Human beings must act through
disciplining imperfect knowledge
with progressive measures of
control.
 The uncanny is converted to the
familiar by representation.
 Human communication is imperfect
but the consequences are absolute.
 Temporal disjunction between
knowledge as theory and action as
practice.
 Know how.
 Human beings always imitate and
very to adapt traditions and
overcome difficulties.
 “Human relation to reality is
indirect, circumstantial, delayed,
selective,” and metaphorical.” 439
 Roles are tried on and changed by
convention. Expectations change;
satisfactions vary.
 Knowledge and action situated in
rhythms, pauses, accelerations.
 Know why.

21. Archeological Approach to Communication
The history of ideas versus the archeology of knowledge. Ideal vs. Material

22. CRITICAL COMMUNICATION
INQUIRY IN THE EXERCISE OF
HEGEMONIC CRITIQUE
Representations are discursive activities that articulate
power relationships.
Institutions distribute power through rationalizations that
legitimate confinement, constraint, and resources.
Skepticism turns toward master narratives in play and
inward into communicative norms.
Governmentality is the process of justifying interventions
to preserve social order.
Madness is an exemplary case of rules developed over
time.
Archeologist does not share the time, but comes to
communication as fragments of a time to be reassembled.

23. Critical Communication Inquiry
PERSPECTIVE BY INCONGRUITY SURVEILLANCE & RATIONALIZATION
Appreciate human ingenuity & change. Advance resistance & skepticism

24. Metaphors
THE LIBRARY THE ARCHIVE
 Expert-client relationship to
provide access to preserved
knowledge.
 Duty divided between expert
catalogue and training clients.
 Libraries adapt to local values in
formulating rules and events.
 Literacy broadens access to the
human condition trumping class.
 Space and time are adapted to
categories of clientele.
 The archive is a structure dedicated
to preserving materials of
reference and representation.
 Archive collects documents from a
time that is special and over.
 Reconstructive work is a matter of
genealogy.
 Synchrony discovers links among
rationalized justifications at one
time; diachrony, change over time.

25. Intervention
NEWT GINGRICH
GENEALOGY OF THE DEMAGOGUE
GABRIELLE GIFFORDS
THE HEROIC & LYRIC ELOQUENCE
Thought-style Set Untimely Rhetoric

26. David Rotchild, The Signal, January 24
As Gingrich’s fate rises, so does Obama’s

27. Dynastic Dynamics?
Critique needed

28. Propaganda Remix: Demagoguery?
PARODIC PHOTOSHOP FACT CHECK POWER
Freud’s Oedipal Struggle Lacan’s Mirror Phase

29. PROPANDADA & THE HYPER REAL
INFORMATION RECASTS SURFACE COMPLEX CODING