from tuning by david antin pages 105 to 121
1984 new york new directions books
isbn number 0 8112 0894 x
ive called this talk
tuning
and you probably have no very good idea of what im going to
talk about and it gave me a certain freedom from expectation
as it gave to you for it is part of my generosity and
self indulgence simultaneously that what i will take for
myself i will allow to others which seems only fair
now i gave
a title to this piece long before coming here and if the
title i gave was not intended to offer you a very precise image
of what i was going to do and if you see me fiddling with
this tape recorder its mainly because i have no very precise
image of what im going to say though i have a considerable
notion of the terrain into which i tend to move and
the only way im going to find out whether it was worth doing
or not is when i hear what ive got which has been
my way of entrapping myself and the reason ive chosen to
entrap myself rather than to prepare in advance a precise set
of utterances has been that i felt myself ive written
things before this in the natural vacuum that is the
artificial hermetic closet that literature has been in for some
time and the problem for me is in the closet
confronting a typewriter and no person so that for me
literature defined as literature has no urgency it has no
need of address there are too many things no there are
not too many things there are only a few things you may want
to talk about but there are too many ways you could talk
about them and no urgency in which way you choose to talk
about them there are too many ways to proceed too many
possibilities for making well crafted objects none of which
seem particularly necessary
i dont think im unique in feeling the
absence of urgency in constructing a literary object its
in fact i think a fairly recent aberration the existence
of literature conceived in a tight framework there is
some sense of urgency out there a passing police car
they have an audience they have an audience and a
need and they may respond to it badly but they
have their sense of urgency the most exotic example i can
think of and the most striking example i can think of
which i have thought about recently and which is not
something i want to spend a great deal of time thinking about
here is a kind of post napoleonic commitment to
producing an amazingly important object balzac say
i dont
really want to talk about balzac except that hes an example of
incredible arrogance and ambition with nothing to say a man
goes into a closet in order to say it a half baked kid decides
to be a great writer to be like napoleon to take over the
empire of letters what would he do? whatever was going
to be great what would be great? classical tragedies
that was what was great in paris what else would be great
in paris? racine what else? he would write plays
now its very difficult you go with nothing in your
mind in particular except your own future greatness
you go there to paris to write great plays because
thats where they write them you go there mainly to
exercise your dominion balzac is a good example he
couldnt speak he had nothing to say
coffee black coffee
was the answer self intoxication late at night what
came out presumably
ive never seen an autograph manuscript
of balzac and i dont know anybody who has but ive seen
early proof sheets
he obviously managed to achieve
finally utterance a string of clichés an incredible
propulsion of garbage an incredible group of commonplaces
flowing one after another
but they flow after endless
cups of coffee which presumably finally killed him
second proof sheet third proof sheet i never saw a second or
third proof sheet presumably i saw eleventh proof sheets
or something of that order theyre filled with literary
high class the flow of clichés the flow of platitudinous
trash is interrupted primarily by self conscious reflexive
high class prose that enters into the flow one thing
was flowing and it was nonsense but it was at least flowing
after that there were second thoughts and third
thoughts and fourth thoughts balzac criticizing balzac
getting smarter learning little bits and pieces of junk
embedding a mosaic of early 19th century cleverness
going swedenborgianism going sociology going
real worldism going whatever to take away the
embarrassment of this fluent trash which flowed all the way
through unrealized and absurd clichéd scenes followed
largely by modifications that add respectability and slow down
the pace of the prose till finally in what? the
22nd proof sheet we have the brokenbacked mosaic of a balzac
novel a monster
what we have is a fluency of utterance
and energy broken and restrained in a disastrous mosaic
which is an image of what an image of class an image
of mentalism an image of whatever it was the now nearly
worthless currency of 19th century hip that had value then
for that reason that it was their currency and there are
strata in balzac and all the strata appear together
pressed in various sized fragments onto the surface of the
text a balzac novel is an archeological trove its not so
much a work as it is a series of self conscious reflections on
his inability to let his talk fall where it fell because he
wanted to be great
its very bad to want to be great because
theres no reason in the world why you should be great until
the world decides that you are great which is all that
greatness consists of now i didnt start from a critique
of balzac and im not interested in laying balzac open to this
critique that could apply almost as well to so many other
writers but balzac is an enormously interesting case
for the reason that he is so typical of the arrogance of
literature as a construction that will eventually claim to
equal the career of a progressively accumulated intelligence
that the world had just come to call science and this new
career would be something like a science a quasi science of
the real world
what "real world" the world of common
sense made to seem as if it was more than common sense?
or less than common sense? the world of if A then B
the truth table its the plausible world of the marriage novel
the plausible world of the money accumulating novel the
plausible world of the success story its all plausible but
its plausible but its plausible only afterwards because
before that what is it its an opera or a fairy tale because
balzac writes basically a romance or an opera which he then
subjects to a somewhat cynical critique a 19th century
critique of this romance and the critique is called realism
now theres a
kind of comedy to this because the critique is a kind of
afterword its as though balzac expects to be judged why
does he expect to be judged its an interesting question
he expects to be judged because hes going to have an object
in front of the world and the world will have the leisure and
the desire to examine it once and then examine it
again and then examine it again and then again and
its as if he was back in school and he was preparing to face
a board of examiners and he was turning in his examination
booklet that this board of examiners was going to scrutinize
over and over slowly turning its pages to see if they pass
now theres one
issue in a book its that a book is always reinspectable
when you recall a passage it is always the same which is
unlike talk which you can also recall but is never the
same and is never reinspectable except in your
memory that is you may believe that its the same
but you have no certainty that its the same and the talk
goes out into the world and its gone and its not worth
any more than anyones confidence in you or confidence in
their ability to perform the interpretive act upon the discourse
with you because the discourse is the one thing
that youre sure of theres a situation and you respond to it
now this
lust to produce this unassailable object this examination
passing book is a common enough lust and balzac is
only an early example of the lust to produce such a thing
and there is this book and it is produced as an object which
becomes an object of scrutiny and if it passes this
examination it becomes an objet d'art and you know its
there and becomes precious it becomes valued and winds up
in libraries a critical apparatus discusses this thing as if
it were more than the provisional activities of a man the
provisional talk of balzac in some situation and balzac is a
very interesting man in spite of the fact that it is a tissue of clichés
that emerges from his mouth because clichés are the
commonplaces by which we begin a discourse
there is no way to
put down cliché in the beginning because if there was
nothing in common in the utterances with which we addressed
each other thered be no way that we could understand what we
were saying in some sense there is no adequate theory of how
we understand what we say to each other one of the most
depressing things about the present attempts at knowledge
is the array of formal machines we have for explaining how we
know what we say and how poorly they explain it
for a while
i was involved in formal linguistics chomskyan linguistics
and i gave it up when it became apparent that chomskyan
linguistics promised no intelligent rationale for dealing with
semantics because all of chomskys proposals and thats
all they are is proposals and all of roland barthes proposals
suggest and sometimes even claim that the troops in back of
them will soon come in and mop up all the details in the
beginning there is a brilliant proposal and it has this form
there is a
sudden flash of illumination that is quite brilliant and momentary
and it is all dazzling virtuosity you see we have this set
of rules that will describe the fundamental basis for the
understanding of language by all of its speakers now you
may realize that these rules that were writing are in themselves
provisional the particular rules that were writing are to be
sure only baby examples of the real rules we are setting out
to write rules that are part of the fundamental grammar and we
happen to be using the real words of english to apply them to
and this shouldnt really be done that way because our rules
apply to much more general formatives because you see we are
really beginning by referring to a universal phonetics
a universal phonetics is moderately well established it
begins to break down only at the neurological level but there is
a universal phonetics a fundamental set of phonic classes that
we have characterized by a set of features these are universal
features that we have derived in part from their manner of
articulation generation in the mouth say and partially
acoustical features derived from the way they seem to sound
or seem to sound to instruments devised to characterize certain
aspects of the way they sound to the human ear anyway
we have these features which we may not entirely agree upon
that nevertheless constitute the reservoir of the moderately
well grounded universal phonetics that are more or less
agreed upon and which the men in back of me are very busily
in the process of working out the details of the agreement of
and these are to be mapped by a set of phonological rules that
have not been entirely formulated but the men in back of
me are about to finally formulate them into a systematic set that
will provide for all the significant distinctions that are made
among sound classes in all of the languages of the earth that
will allow us to map these distinctions into a set of formatives
which you may be more familiar with when they are called
morphemes or even more colloquially words which
are then mapped into sets of possible and distinguishable
arrangements we could call the syntax of the language
and while these are also not yet quite worked out quite
satisfactorily the men in back of me are busily working this
out also all we then have to do is map this entire system into
a thorough and sufficiently abstract lexicon that will contain
all of the rules for relating the possible lexemes words
these formatives that point toward anything in the world
to the range of their possible meanings references and
senses which should all be found in this lexicon also to
be prepared by the people in back of me some of whom have
yet to be born
now they are working away at this i suppose
at m.i.t. which is relatively close or theyre working
away at it at the university of california perhaps which is
not so close to you but a lot closer to me
are they really? are
they really working away at it? in what sense? in what
sense is it possible to write a systematic semantics? in what
sense do we understand language that we could write a
fundamental and systematic semantics
presumably we would use
a feature theory because it worked so well in phonetics or
has almost worked so well in phonetics and is about to work
perfectly in phonetics and there would be for any word
lexeme sounds good technical lexeme high class
twenty third proof sheet lexeme basically we ought to
be able to reduce the lexicon to a presumably finite set of
lexemes though there are problems in that because at the
same time that it will have to be finite it will have to be potentially
nonfinite because you can always coin new words from
old ones or parts of old ones or merely from new arrangements
of phonemes by a set of rules from the word generating
system which would have to be a part of the systematic lexicon
this would be the word generating part of the lexicon and
this set of words would presumably have new meanings different
from the collection of old meanings which they might
well so that as the world filled up with distinguishable
new things or new states or new acts or modalities the lexicon
would have to fill up with new meanings to distinguish them
but this is only the potentially nonfinite part of the lexicon
what we would expect to find would be a finite if fairly large
set of quite general or abstract features and some kind of rules
for combining and partitioning these into all the words that have
been and may have to come to be
though this might sound overly
ambitious even to a language scientist at m.i.t. or to a structuralist
at the ecole des haute etudes though there is no accounting
for what would sound overly ambitious to them since there are
so many people standing in back of them working out just these
problems
still more modestly you might want to ask of this
lexicon that it lay out at least a fairly compact set of features to
generate the system of references and senses of a significant segment
of the words currently used in a particular natural language
like english
now how would they do this by a feature
theory that proved so successful in phonetics
now the nucleus of
the lexicon will consist of a set of features and what kind
of features will they be you know they will be binary
contrasting features sets of opposing pairs like hot and
cold or hard and soft but much more abstract perhaps
so they could apply to a great variety of words to some
degree and form a kind of feature system thesaurus of the
language and each feature would be two poles of a kind of
axis with one end positive and the other negative or one
end zero and the other one
oddly enough it will resemble
somewhat machine computer language and that may
surprise you but it shouldnt be too surprising because so
many things now are analyzed in this way which is clear and
unequivocal and convenient for the machines which we now
have so many of and which seem so reasonable now that we
have so many people acclimated to working with these machines
and it is of course easy to distinguish zero and one the
empty set and the full set that it might seem simple even
reasonable to approach the lexicon this way marking each
lexeme as a bundle of features that are scored zero when they
are absent and one when theyre present and say you only
bother to mark features that are present otherwise these
features are absent
now lets take a pair of words like
"generous" and "thrifty" say we could probably find an axis
that ran through them unfortunately we could find many more
than one axis but lets take an axis an axis is a good
word it suggests so much a kind of space through with
it runs a kind of semantic globe domain? hyperspace?
anyway lets call it an axis because this axis is like a line
that will be determined by two points like any other straight
line thats nice straight lines are convenient and
friendly from our days in geometry and they are all so nicely
determined by two points and these two points are its poles
one at each end of the line and one pole lets say the
positive pole is called "open" and the negative pole
the one on the other end of this axis line is called "closed"
"open"/"closed" thats our feature we call it "1"
when its "open" and we call it "0" when its "closed"
ok this
is one of our features say and weve got two words we happen
to want to deal with "generous" and "thrifty" now im
sure you can see how easy it will all be "generous" will be
"open" and we will mark it "1" and "thrifty" will be "closed"
and well mark it "zero" what could be easier unless you
want to ask what happens to "stingy" which might seem to
lie a lot closer to the "closed" end of this axis of meaning
closer to "zero" so to speak
but what could that mean that
a word could lie closer to the same axis than another it could
mean that we will have to find only pure opposites or antonyms
lying at ends of feature axes and that all the words in the
system will have to be plotted by the intersection of various axes
their spatial coordinates in some kind of hyperspace so that
we know just how far off the axis of "closed" and "open"
"generous" and "thrifty" may really be and how close they lie
to an axis of "big" and "small" for example or "soft" and
"hard"
how many features will we need to map any lexeme
how many features are there is there a feature axis that
can be constructed by drawing a line between any two words
that can be regarded as opposites seen from some point of
view will we have to connect every word with every
other word in practice in principle dollars and doughnuts
if not will
there be a finite set of such contrasts? and how will we select
them and is this finite set potentially infinite? will we
have to have a rule system for feature construction as there is
a system for word building? and supposing this is so will
we be able to determine the distances angular or other
that separate words that are not opposites from the polar
positions that separate "thrifty" from "generous" and
"stingy" which may happen to lie on an axis and will we
know if a word is intersected by more than two axial lines for
two lines determine a plane and if whether the three or
four or five lines lie in one or two or three different planes
still its a terrific idea if we have all of those people there
in back of us working away the way they always seem to be
in the marvelous flashy and ultimately trivial proposals made by
transformational grammarians and french structuralists
now trivial in
what sense for these are all glamorous proposals backed up
by regiments of intelligence and diligence packing away facts
all over the world and subordinating them to the wonderfully
clear and commonsensical ideas and yet and yet how
could you ever use them these great unclosing enterprises
supported by equally unending granting institutions
i remember
once commenting on the rather similar theory that i.a. richards
held for language contrasts within something as commonplace
as a poem now richards held a fairly commonsensical
notion that a poem was constructed of a series of utterances that
you could consider as a series of pushes or pulls in one direction
or another which certainly had the advantage of being a
dynamic theory of a poem but what he was offering was a
kind of vector analysis of a poem and this is very similar
to a binary contrast analysis because a vector is a directed
magnitude a line of a certain magnitude moving in a particular
direction and what you mean by a magnitude is the force
of the utterance and the direction is the sense of the line and
that sounds reasonable enough
and from that it might follow
that a poem is a composition of forces but unfortunately
to deal with this even in an uncomplicated way you need
to be able to specify certain things whether all the statements
utterances of the poem lie in a single plane and if not how
these planes are related to each other and how these forces
lines are measured off against a specified set of coordinates
which is all that will allow you to measure them anyway and
what means you will take to compose all these
fortunately for
richards he was not so thoroughgoing and seemed to suggest
that all of these lines lay pretty much in one plane that they
were merely a matter of push and pull one line or image for
or against another which sounds terrific unless you try to do
it so suppose we take a poem by auden say and imagine
he said "they lived in houses that were colloquial and blue"
we could
probably say that "blue" lies closer to the pole of an axis called
"concrete" and "colloquial" lies closer to its other pole "abstract"
and that part of the energy of that line its dialectic
arises from the collision of these two differently directed
adjectives directed at their "houses" maybe at least that
axis makes some kind of sense to us because after all
"blue" constitutes an experiential fact it is an outcome of
vision it marks their houses when we look at them and
"colloquial" well its an overall judgment of the style in which
they live so it seems further from the physical reality
now there are
other axes that run through "colloquial" and "blue" probably
too many to do this conveniently and presumably richards
would never have undertaken this without the help say
of fodor and katz or a variety of other generative semanticians
whose help richards probably never know he was about to receive
and probably never would except that i am in a generally
helpful frame of mind and will provide it
now for the sake of the
provisional convenience that is the universal characteristic
of this approach let us pretend that these are the two most
important features that this is the axis that counts
so in
what sense is "blue" concrete only in the sense that you
suppose "blue" to be some kind of physical phenomenon
the name of a particular range of electromagnetic frequencies
or the like which it is not or more naturally that it is
the name of a physical experience and that "colloquial" is a
loose denomination for a kind of behavior for a kind of act
somewhere on the scale of deviation from a notion of "propriety"
say or "formality"
all this seems quite obvious and yet
and yet even here it is not so simple for if blue is the
name we give to a particular physical experience a particular
visual experience an experience of looking it is not the
name of a single particular experience "blue" it is more like
the name of a class of experiences to which it applies somewhat
loosely as to a range of blues and even there is it not so
simple because this experience this class of physical
experiences to which this name properly applies is really only
a part of an experience or part of a part of an experience
because it is very uncommon to experience color alone in
fact we have to learn than name "color" which is seldom
encountered alone to determine that there is a part of the visual
experience that we can call "color" and that within that
experience or part of an experience there is a set of
alternatives that cover a range or divide it into the colors
we know
so "blue" is a subset of the conception color and the
conception "color" is a conceptual extraction we make from the
experience of looking
for example you look around the room
i look around the room and youre wearing pants that
somebody might say are "blue" on some days of the week
and they say "hes wearing blue jeans" his pants are
colloquial and blue
now "blue" for an american
a european which is about the same thing here is part
of a vernacular color system with about 8 terms you know
nonspecialized you say visual experience subset color subset
nonspecialized youve got red and blue and yellow and white
and black and green and purple maybe which is really seven
and maybe brown and grey to throw in the two commonest
tertiaries and there you are and it adds up to nine and
you could be a sport and add orange and it gives you ten
common terms into which you can divide the whole world of
color experience more or less and in a nonspecialized way
and what i mean by this is that they constitute a range in the
sense that these names shouldnt cross so you couldnt confuse
blue with yellow say or red with blue or black or white or green
and this is nonspecialized color in the sense that "vermilion" is
not part of this system because there youre moving into
specialized color
for example i wouldnt say that those are
turquoise pants theyre not but thats not why i wont
say it azure? ultramarine? think of the term
"cerulean" "he wore a pair of cerulean colloquial pants"
"cerulean" is perhaps somewhat more concrete than "blue"
or at least it seems so but now "blue" is not so
concrete anymore because we have had to remove it by a
process of conceptual abstraction from an aspect of a visual
experience "color" and its only within "color" that
"blue" has any meaning at all and "blue" occupies a space
within this system or by jakobsonian theory is one of a set
of possible substituents that form the range of the color paradigm
in this system
"cerulean" if it is fitted into it may come to occupy a
narrow portion of the space occupied by "blue" where it may
come to serve as one of a set of possible substituents within the
subparadigm "blue" along with a whole set of other
alternatives like "azure" "turquoise" "ultramarine" "prussian"
"sky" "cyan" "royal" "navy" "powder" "baby" "midnight"
but i
think not they are not part of this system at all just
pressed up against it in a crush resulting from the collision of
several other systems of color naming within the english
language
but within the simple vernacular system of nine or ten
colors the important thing is that there should be no crossing
if it is blue it will not cross red or yellow or green
no my
wife and i have a difference of opinion every time we look at
bluish green or greenish blue i always think its blue she
always think its green its true she looks at a car the
car is driving in the street she says o look at that green car and
i say its blue she says no no its green i say no no
its blue really we dont argue about it at all i have come
to expect that when she sees a certain kind of car that i would
call blue she will call it green as well as she knows that when i see
that same car i will call it blue though she calls that green
and that is a
kind of language understanding too that we speak each
of us somewhat different color dialects and understand
them both though only using one ourselves
but to the
australian aborigine an aranda say among the aranda
there is i take it a different way of looking at all this or at
least a different way of talking about what we have just been
looking at for in aranda in the vernacular aranda system
as it existed in the 19th century there were according to the
people familiar with them four or actually five
fundamental color terms two blacks white red
and one other term for all the rest one black was purka
used of charcoal and the other was urupulla which included
brown and a fair range of greys white was churungura
red tutuka and the other was tierga the sky was tierga a
green leaf was tierga and yellow ocher was also tierga
now this is a
very different system for talking about seeing than ours one
for red and one for the range of blue yellow and green
i have no doubt
that we could persuade any reasonable aranda gentleman or lady
to distinguish between sky color leaf color and the color ocher
and they could do this very handily this gentleman or lady
an aranda painter maybe they could say that of course
one was sky tierga the other was leaf tierga and the last was
ocher tierga but that they were merely three different shades of
the same color tierga that is that they were all the
same color but modified by some other aspect of vision that
weve chosen to call "shade" which would be somewhat similar
to our "light" and "dark" or "deep" or "thin" or "saturated" or
"not" but we really wouldnt have any appropriate name for
this feature of vision that we have just called "shade" but which
applies to a somewhat different range of visual experiences
because their word "color" would also not apply to quite the
same visual experiences of looking as ours or would apply in
a different way so their word "shade" which would
depend for its significance on their word "color" as our word
"shade" depends on our word "color" would not be at all
the same and we would simply not have any word for it that
came conveniently to hand though we might very well know what
they mean by it
and this leads to interesting conclusions
because it seems that "blue" occupies a different semantic space
to use our old formalist conception of word meaning a
different semantic space than our word "blue" and that not only
that their conception of "color" probably has a different
spatial configuration in the semantic domain of aranda looking
than our notion "color"
what interesting effects this should have
upon an aranda critic of a fauve painting an aranda critic of
a fauvist painting what a terrible idea because it is
virtually a certainty that where a fauve painter would have placed
blues and greens next to each other with deliberate assertiveness
an aranda would not see two colors placed edge to edge just
one color the aranda critic would surely reduce the fauve
color system to a smaller numbered system with wider ranges
so it would come to pass that a painting which consists of five
colors for us could consist of three for an aranda an aranda
painter hes looking at a different painting provided that
what hes looking at is the color it will be an entirely
different painting because the space will be partitioned entirely
differently within the world of color this semantic space
it seems then
from this analysis that blue is a very abstract term that it is
very far from being the name of a concrete physical experience
but it is based on a very elaborate system of inferences and
abstractions and that the physical act of seeing intersects
with a socially preserved historically developed set of
partitioning devices that will facilitate us and hinder us
selectively in our seeing and so blue lies very close to the
abstraction pole of the feature axis concrete/abstract when
it is seen from this point of view which is a consideration
when youre considering how close something seems to be to
something else and even then we dont know how close
but forget that
how close the question that is more important is where
we are standing
im standing were standing youre
standing somewhere facing somewhere in this semantic space
if there is such a thing as semantic space we are standing in it
because there is no looking without standing sitting?
somewhere with your eyes looking out of the front of your head
and not behind it
now youre standing somewhere and im
standing somewhere in semantic space and theyre not the
same place because i find it hard to imagine us all or any of us
standing in precisely the same place even in semantic space
now supposing from where im standing "blue" looks pretty
close to abstract and from where youre standing it looks
pretty close to concrete i can imagine your position and you
can imagine mine how can we each get to imagine the others
position how come i can imagine your position as well
as mine? how do you get to imagine my position as well as
yours?
if auden had written this poem in which he said "their
houses were colloquial and blue" we would feel that "blue" was
intended to be a concrete term that from audens position in
semantic space "blue" looked fairly close to the pole marked
concrete that it was intended to be a concrete term a
primitive term perhaps such as one familiar to the experience
of children one of the five hundred basic words of english or
1000 and that colloquial is not such a term belongs to
the social world of adults or linguists or university graduates
and therefore abstract
now how do we do this come to
understand each other? now this may be a bad term to
understand but let us use it for the moment because we
will know what we mean by it here now anyone who is going
to have a theory of language will have to have a theory of how we
use it to come to understand each other how we come to an
understanding how we may not be at an understanding when
we begin to talk and how we may arrive at an understanding
when we are through or something of the sort
they dont
have to have merely a grammar they have to know to what the
grammar applies and when to apply it that way or the
grammar is a fairly meaningless construct if you cant propose some
set of rules though thats a bad term rules some system for
orienting ourselves to understand other peoples uses of
language what they are saying and its relation to some kind
of practice you don't understand their language you and an
aranda cannot have a conversation at all until you somehow
learn what an aranda uses those words for and under what
conditions
now theres no grammar in the world that can provide
for that nor is there any theory of grammar that will do
that for you nor is there any theory of language that will
do that for you
now the reason i chose to talk about tuning
i was proposing a way of looking at how we understand
things how we come to understand things come to an
understanding with each other about things through
language has something to do with a notion process
i would like to call tuning
. . .