Tuesday, November 08, 2011

The Prose of the World

The Prose of the World is the title of a posthumously published book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the title of the second chapter of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things. It appears to be something Hegel said about the Roman state. "Prosaic writing," said Merleau-Ponty, "limits itself to using, through accepted signs, the meanings already accepted in a given culture." He seems to distinguish both "great prose" and poetry from such ordinary prose writing, which occurs "when a writer is no longer capable of ... founding a new universality and of taking the risk of communicating". Well, I would argue that academic prose is also incapable of "founding a new universality", and this is really for the better. Academic writing is very much an attempt to use the language within the limits of accepted usage. There is a whole world of prose: the universe of which it is always already possible to speak.

It is possible to read Foucault as an argument for the contingency of this prosaic world. "Don Quixote is the negative of the Renaissance world," he tells us; "writing has ceased to be the prose of the world." And it is of course true that Merleau-Ponty's "new universalities" do emerge, that the conditions of (prosaically) meaningful communication do change. For him, poetic language was the means by which such changes occurred. Again, I want to emphasize the virtues of prose, of ordinary usage, of writing that does not imply institutional change or the dissolution of what Foucault called the "alliance" of "resemblances and signs". It is in ordinary, academic prose that we make and support knowledge claims. Somebody has got to do it.

And not nearly enough of us do, I think. Many academics struggle with the language in the manner of Don Quixote, who "wanders off on his own," as Foucault put it. We "no longer read nature and books alike as part of a single text", in terms of their similitude. But why not? Why don't we acknowledge the simple utility of producing a description of the facts, or articulating them in prose? Why have we become so skeptical of this basic function of writing? My answer is simply that we are out of practice, and therefore a bit out of shape. We're in poor form.

Students and, too often, scholars do not make writing a regular part of their studies, of their life of inquiry. In relative terms, they do "read a lot", but they read even ostensibly factual prose as though it were the accounts of adventures of madmen, "without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness ... no longer the marks of things ... sleeping ... covered in dust" (Foucault, op. cit.). Maybe we will never recover of our form. All it would take, of course, is a bit of regular work. We would need to sit down, for an hour or two every day and record what we know as claims that have support. And when we read the work of others, we would read them as making claims and offering support in turn.

Instead, it often seems, we have, like Foucault, come to see such activities as tantamount to a belief in magic. All writing has become fiction. We appreciate each other's writing in the manner of literature rather than simply and straightforwardly "taking issue" with what is said—on the assumption that the words we are using are meaningful in the ordinary prosaic way and may therefore be compared to, i.e., "read against", the world of facts that make our utterances true or false. Ironically (which is to say, appropriately), this little rant in favor of the representational function of language will be considered by many to be the ravings of a madman who has read, with a certain romance, too many books and his brain has dried up. Perhaps I am tilting at windmills?

5 comments:

Jonathan said...

So a belief in factual writing is a form of "magical thinking" now? The poles are reversed? After all, nobody doubts that language is capable of lying or of creating elaborate fictions...

Presskorn said...

I've researched the "the prose of the world"-bit... I like such puzzles..

And it appears, that it is, in fact, not something that Hegel said of Roman State. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel spoke of the Roman state as expressing "the prose of history", "the prose of life" and "the prose of Spirit".

But (and this is perhaps of interest to your use of the phrase at the Pangrammaticon) the phrase "the prose of the world" is from from his description of Roman art in the Lectures on Fine Arts:

http://books.google.dk/books?id=ia4itFh1RhsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:CNB3NQRD9Y0C&hl=da&ei=08TATpaiNc_c4QTqr-TABA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22prose%20of%20the%20world%22&f=false

The concept of "prose", however, is generally used somewhat disdainful by Hegel:

Prose is the Roman art and it expresses the constraints imposed on the individual by the world.

It is preceded by Poetry - the Greek art - which express the organic unity of world and spirit.

And it is followed by the roman-tic art of Hegel's own time, which expresses the freedom of the individual.

Andrew Shields said...

You capture an impression of my twenty-something students: they do not see the claims made by others as forming a hierarchy of better and worse claims. It's all just a bunch of viewpoints, each of which is valid in its own way. They seem to have little sense that a particular viewpoint could be demonstrably wrong.

One effect of this in Switzerland is that lots of people take homeopathic medicine ...

Thomas said...

I recently had a weird argument with a PhD student who refused to distinguish between the meaning of:

Jones defines X as...
Jones describes X as...
Jones approaches X as...
Jones argues that X is...

I was trying to show that the words we choose matters. He insisted that there'd be no difference here. I felt that sensation Jonathan notes above: the reversal of the poles.

I did get the student to agree that there's a difference between:

Jones claims that...
and
Jones denies that...

(He balked here saying "yes, well, obviously!)

I dunno. Maybe he was twenty-something. But I think he's a bit older.

Thomas said...

BTW, thanks Thomas for that link to Hegel. I'll be bloggin about it next week.