Walker Percy - The Message in the Bottle - How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

Once it becomes clear that what is to be studied is not sentence forms but particular language events, it also becomes clear that the subject of investigation in this instance is not the sentence itself but the mode in which it is asserted. The sentence can be studied only by a formal science such as grammar or logic, but a sentence event is open to a rich empirical phenomenology that is wholly unprovided by what passes currently as semantics. Nor can a neobehavioristic psychology make sense of assertory behavior; it can only grasp a sequence of space-time events which it attempts to correlate by constant functions. But assertion — the giving of a name to a thing, this is water, or the declaring of a state of affairs, the water is cold —is not a sequence. It is a pairing or identification of word and thing, class and thing, thing and attribute, and so on. Stimulus and response events are studied by a quantitative science. But the quasi identification events of symbolic behavior can be grasped only by a qualitative phenomenology. This qualitative scale must take account not only of true-or-false-or-nonsense statements (water is cold, water is dry, water is upside down), but also of various modes of magic identification. It does not suffice, for example, to say that the assertion of a Bororo tribesman of Brazil, “I am a parakeet,” is false or nonsense. Nor is it adequate to say that it is false scientifically but true mythically.* It is necessary to understand the particular mode of identification of a particular language-event.†

Sentences exhibiting the same syntactic and semantic structure may be asserted in wholly different modes of identification. For example, the sentence “My son John has become a roentgenologist” has the logical form of the assertion of class membership, a ? A. It has this form regardless of the particular language event in which it is asserted. The sentence can be asserted in more than one mode, however. Thus, if a psychiatrist should hear his patient utter the above sentence, he may very well understand, knowing her as he does, that she is asserting a magic mode of class membership. Her son John has gone off to a scientific place where he has undergone a mystical transformation and emerged as a roentgenologist. Another patient may assert the same sentence and be quite clearly understood to mean that her son has acquired a skill which it is convenient to speak of as a class membership.*

The action sentence “John treats patients with X-rays” may also be asserted as a transparent vehicle intending a nonmagic action not utterly different from everyday actions of pushing, pulling, hitting, shooting, and so forth. Or it may be asserted magically: John makes a scientific pass with his paraphernalia and his ray, and the patient is cured.

The connotations of words themselves, apart from assertory behavior, undergo a characteristic semantic evolution which can be understood only by a science proper of symbolic behavior, for it is the particular word event which is studied and not the “semantic rule” by which it is applied to its designatum. The scale ranges from the almost miraculous discovering power of the word-vehicle as a metaphor in the hands of the poet, to its sclerosis through usage and familiarity until it becomes a semantic husk serving rather to conceal than to disclose what it designates. When Shakespeare compares winter trees with

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang†

the words come as fresh as creation from the symbolizer and serve to discover for the reader what he too saw but did not know he saw. But when, in everyday conversation, I tell you, “Last summer I went abroad and had some interesting experiences and saw some historical sites,” the words act as biscuit cutters carving up memory into the weariest shapes of everyday usage.*

THE SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE OF A THERAPIST-PATIENT COMMUNICATION EVENT

To determine how the generic structure of symbolic behavior is relevant to the therapist-patient relation as an instance thereof, I shall consider briefly a hypothetical language event.

Patient: “Here is a dream which may be of some interest to you. Since you are an analyst, I am sure you will agree it has psychiatric implications.”

Therapist: “Sounds interesting.”

Patient: “In this dream I was walking down a strange street. A sexy-looking woman standing behind a Dutch door beckoned to me. I hesitated for a second, then against my better judgment, I went into the house.”

Therapist: “Horrendous! [Pronounced heartily with a j : horrenjus!]” †

In the study of a spoken language event, a written transcription is, of course, wholly unacceptable.‡ All phonetics and vocal modifiers are omitted. Even a tap recording is inadequate since it does not transmit gestures. In my comment on this exchange, moreover, I will say nothing of such strictly linguistic analyses as might be made of phonemes, morphemes, and grammar. Nor shall I say anything about the “content” of the exchange — for example, the dream and its “meaning”—important though this may be in the patient’s dynamics. But if one does not consider the linguistics and content of the language event, what else remains to be said about it? What remains is nothing else but the particular structure of the symbolic behavior, of which the symbolic tetrad is the generic type (see Figure 2). The assumption that all that is going on is an interaction between organisms deprives the investigator of the means of taking account of the molar event of communication, leaving him only with the alternative of fitting as best he can the qualitative traits of interpersonal behavior into the Procrustean bed of a response psychology. But once the generic character of symbolic behavior is recognized, then the modes of intersubjectivity, “world,” “being-in-a-world,” and assertory identity are seen as particular expressions of the fundamental possibilities allowed by the structure of interpersonal process — just as drives, needs, reinforcement and extinction, stimulus, response, are the fundamental categories of organismic interaction.

The mode of assertory identity. It may very well be that some of the assertory behavior in this example is magical. The patient is an educated layman, the sort who takes pride in being well informed in scientific matters, especially psychiatry, and in his use of psychiatric jargon. He quite consciously uses “analyst” rather than “psychoanalyst.” One often notices in psychiatric interviews a kind of pseudo reversal of the roles of scientist and layman. The patient often uses such phrases as “Oedipus complex” (he would never say “inferiority complex,” since it passed long ago into everyday usage, passing, moreover, as a semantic husk of very questionable value), “sibling rivalry,” “aggressions,” and so forth, while the therapist is careful to steer clear of them, partly because he does not wish to use a technical phrase the patient would not understand, but perhaps even more because he is intuitively aware of the magic abuses to which expertise is peculiarly susceptible.* The patient in question may have, by reason of this very knowledgeability about psychiatry, fallen prey to a magic mode of identification. The clause Since you are an analyst very likely asserts a mystical transformation by which an ordinary human being is transfigured and informed by the resplendent scientific symbols “psychiatrist” and “psychoanalyst” and finally by the shorthand expression used among the elite, “analyst.”

The world of the therapist and his being-in-the-world. Insofar as he is a scientist, the therapist has assumed the posture of objectivity. As a consequence of what might be called the Thalesian revolution, men have learned, beginning at about the time of the Ionian philosophers and the Vedantists of the epic period,† to strike a theoretical posture toward the world which would enable them to discover the underlying principles and causes by which particular things and events can be understood. The scientist is not in his world in the same way, as, say, a member of a cosmological culture like the Bororo tribesmen, nor as a wanderer between cultures like Abraham, nor even as his fellow culture members, the businessman and the streetcar conductor. Insofar as he practices his science, he stands, in Buber’s phrase, “over against” his world as knower and manipulator of that which can be known and manipulated. The scientist may so be characterized without pejoration — indeed if he were in his world in any other way, he could hardly be a scientist. Yet as a psychiatrist, a “participant observer,” he must also re-enter the world in some mode or other as a person who is friendly and sympathetic, or anyhow appears so, to his patient.