"The Conversations of Our Times": A Gricean Outlook

--- by JLS
------- for the GC.

----OK, so when Jason K. mentioned to us the JB reference, we were reminded of the day when Dutton gave her the award ("I'm still waiting for the check" she wrote) for this bit -- out of context, -- "The conversations of our times", in Diacritics. We are considering it here as an example of some sort of 'handshake', although perhaps it's best to stick to the idea that it's like a name-code: "She's being Derridean", etc. -- the way 'names' have become brands -- and we don't mean, of course, 'Griceian'.

Butler wrote:

The move from a structuralist account
in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively
homologous ways to a view of hegemony
in which power relations are subject
to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation
brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and
marked a shift from a form of
Althusserian theory that takes
structural totalities as theoretical
objects to one in which the
insights into the contingent
possibility of structure inaugurate
a renewed conception of hegemony
as bound up with the contingent
sites and strategies of the
rearticulation of power

Wow. Dennis Dutton has analysed this in detail, and Culler has objected -- with Dutton playing the bad academe, and Culler the bona fide one. There's even an online pdf that generalised the point.

I'll start by pointing the keywords in bold type:

The move from a structuralist account
in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively
homologous ways to a view of hegemony
in which power relations are subject
to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation
brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and
marked a shift from a form of
Althusserian theory that takes
structural totalities as theoretical
objects to one in which the
insights into the contingent
possibility of structure inaugurate
a renewed conception of hegemony
as bound up with the contingent
sites and strategies of the
rearticulation of power

So what's the deal.

Butler wants to say that something, x, brought the question of temporality, or time constraint -- let us recall that her PhD from Yale was on French thought in the 20th century -- especially the German influence, and she is having in mind the idea that a structure became at some point a time-constrained unit. What brought 'time' onto the picture was this move, with draws an analogy between capital and hegemony. This 'x' features the item 'structure' used as a verb, which may be more of a natural thing in French than English:


The move from a structuralist account
in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively
homologous ways to a view of hegemony
in which power relations are subject
to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation

So that's the x, and what the x did was

brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and
marked a shift from a form of
Althusserian theory that takes
structural totalities as theoretical
objects

where 'theoretical object' is again a technicism and where we do find this evidence of name-dropping and names as brands -- in this case good ol' Althusser -- cfr. Gricean. So the gist of the passage is into the 'shift', from a dated Althusserian model

to one in which the
insights into the contingent
possibility of structure inaugurate
a renewed conception of hegemony
as bound up with the contingent
sites and strategies of the
rearticulation of power

So she's becoming Foucaultian. She is saying that the introduction of the time variable resulted in an enriched idea of 'hegemony', which is seen as a contingent, read: fluid -- rearticulation of power. I will now provide my equivalent of Gricean jargon. But before, a cheer for Dutton and a cheer fro Butler. It IS sad that things had become so sensitive (not Butler's fault, of course) that Dutton can no longer award his prizes! (Where _is_ sense of humour?)

Gricean equivalence:

The move from a structuralist account
in which Conversation is understood to
structure social relations in relatively
homologous ways to a view of hegemony
in which power and solidarity relations are subject
to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation
as turns are alternated within the
realm of the Cooperative Principle
brought the question of diachronicity
into the thinking of implicature, and
marked a shift from a form of
paleo-Gricean theory that takes
structural minimal pairs of two-move exchanges as theoretical
objects to one in which the
insights into the contingent
possibility of disimplicature, rather, inaugurate
a renewed conception of Conversation
as bound up with the contingent
sites, strategies, and stratagems, of the
rearticulation of the aforementioned power and solidarity

We'll have a quiz by Friday.