Weighing it Again

Weighing it Again

by Roman Sympos

Author’s Note: The following essay has been revised and updated from a version originally published in a collection of essays entitled Romanticism and the Object (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 177-199), under the pseudonym, “Charles J. Rzepka.” As it happens, that is also the real name of my gifted and dedicated editor. I wish to take this opportunity to thank him for having let me adopt it as my own.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

“Anecdote of the Jar,” Wallace Stevens

In 1990, Nepal had a revolution. Barricades went up and troops fired on demonstrators. A curfew was declared. The airline pilots went on strike. My wife and I and our two sons, ages 11 and 13, were on the last plane into Kathmandu the day the violence began. As we landed, dozens of pilots lined the runway, arms folded across their chests.

Five days later, Nepal was a democracy. (1) The gunfire ended and the curfew was lifted. There was, literally, dancing in the streets and our family joined in. It was our last day in the capital. In a narrow alley packed with celebrants, my wife and I came to a stall displaying metal pots. It was tended by a slim adolescent boy, quick and graceful as a bird, and proficient in English, which was probably why his parents had put him in charge. His beauty made us glad.

A brown copper pot caught our attention. "How much?" Jane asked, pointing to it. The boy didn't hesitate and named his price.

As seasoned travelers we knew that our next move was to underbid, and then converge on agreement. So we made our offer.

"No, no, no"--the boy said, and hefted the pot. "We charge by weight."

Jane and I looked at each other, and then looked at the pot, and then at the boy. "No, I don't think so," Jane said, and we began to walk away.

"Stop, stop!" called the boy.

We turned.

"I weigh it again!" he said.

Unlike Wordsworth encountering the innumeracy of a Welsh cottage girl in “We Are Seven,” we did not feel obliged to teach our young counter clerk better math. As they say in the leadership seminars, his quick thinking had helped us "get to 'yes.'" That is an attractive goal in business, as in most walks of life. Everyone leaves satisfied. In the academic professions, however, as we all know, trying too hard to "get to yes" can be dangerous, encouraging the growth of mutual admiration societies, coteries, and "old-boy" (and today, "old-girl") networks. And the danger is more acute in matters of fact than of interpretation, because matters of fact rest upon descriptions of the material objects that are the bedrock of our profession: the tablet, the scroll, the codex, the manuscript, the book; the stylus, the pen, the typefont, the ink and paper, the press, the layout; the scene of composition, writing, printing, dissemination, and reception; and the circumambient world in which these scenes, and those that writers depict, unfold. While I would not go as far as a colleague of mine, who insists that we are becoming a culture of "nice-ness," we do at times somnambulate toward "yes," even in matters of fact. But why?

For many reasons. Perched on the cusp of tenure or promotion, we may find discretion the better part of valor. Sometimes it's just easier to say "yes," more pleasant all around. Most of the time, however, our failure of skepticism, our disinclination to test for error, arises from the unreflective practice of two otherwise honorable virtues: enthusiasm and trust. The first--enthusiasm--keeps inquiry alive; the second--trust--keeps it efficient, helping us to leverage the collective wisdom of our discipline as we seek to augment it. Factual errors are often committed under the influence of the first of these virtues, enthusiasm, and perpetrated under the influence of the second, trust, typically aided and abetted by impatience--never a virtue in any walk of life.(fn 2)

Everything I’ve just said about the profession of literature goes for the arts of citizenship in a democracy. “Like ours,” I’d once have said. But not today.

Ezra Pound once likened good writing to sanitary surgery: first and foremost, he cautioned, keep your bandages clean! (fn 3) More simply, as Hippocrates put it: "Do no harm." Nowhere in our field is this imperative more important than when we are asserting matters of fact about the objects we handle every day. An error of fact can multiply like a bacterium, though it may cause the original patient nothing worse than a runny nose. In the worst cases, it can induce fever and hallucination, and spread into a discipline-shifting epidemic: mistake Tintern's "ouzy tide" of silt for pollution, and three decades of Romanticists will be hitting Wordsworth upside the head for ignoring industrial symptoms of war. (fn 4) Most disturbing, perhaps, is when the germ of factual error reaches the classroom, where its victims are unlikely to stick around long enough for an antibiotic to be administered, supposing one to have been discovered in time.

And today, on top of all these pressures from within our profession, we must bear up under pressures from without: from our own Federal government, or what passes for government when what goes by that name is working so assiduously for its own destruction.

We will never find a vaccine for factual error, but we can cure or at least quarantine it by restraining our enthusiasm, cultivating patience, and weighing facts again, or rather, weighing--examining, measuring, tallying, re-contextualizing, re-describing--the objects about which facts have been asserted.

All well and good--who would deny it? But how do we get at objects in order to weigh them? From which direction do we approach, and which handle do we grab? And on whose scales will the assay begin? How do we even agree on the objects to be weighed? How do we begin to describe them, from whose perspective, using whose diction and discourse? In short, how do we refer to objects? Can we refer to them? Many proponents of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy and critical theory would insist that we cannot, that the differánce of "arche-writing" determines and restricts our discrimination of objects, leaving us locked inside what Fredric Jameson famously called a "prison house of language." As Elizabeth A. Clark puts it, "If the 'real' is known only in and through its discursive construction, as established by an intra-linguistic system of differences, how could historians assume (as they customarily had) the adequacy of words to refer to things?" (5-6). But even supposing we can refer to objects, and describe them, how do we take the next, crucially important step--how do we justify the statements and narratives we attach to them? How do we arrive at "yes" and still protect the object's material integrity while pursuing all the protracted negotiations of attribution, description, and story we need to get there?

How, in short, do we arrive at “thingness” without resorting to words?

As Heidegger reminds us, the word "thing" comes from the common English and Scandanavian root word for "gathering" or "assembly." "The thing things," he writes, and "[t]hinging gathers" (172). In Icelandic, the "thingfellir," or parliament, is the place of gathering. The thing, similarly, begins to exert its ever-widening power of "gathering" at the site where it is placed or made present--"present-ed," if you will. It is, at this precise point in time and space, as yet unspecified--literally, not yet assigned to a “species” or group that comes with a word attached. Its relation to the perceiving subject can, nonetheless, be localized in relation to their body, either through immediate contact or through some material, instrumental means, e.g., a baseball bat striking a ball. At these sites of “presenting,” the thing "gathers" (Wordsworth and Coleridge would have said, "associates") the qualities, properties, concepts, and ideas to be discriminated in the formation of a particular object of perception. The thing also "gathers" subjectivities: it is the site where they intersect. This makes of "intersubjectivity" nothing more than the horizon of experience comprising all points where subjective spheres of consciousness intersect in “present”-ed things, among which we include the bodies of others. These points of intersection are "thing-sites," if you will. They emerge from within the perceiving subject's realm of experience in relation to all other embodied human subjects, which are themselves viewed as objects within that original horizon of experience.

This understanding of intersubjective "placing," "thing-sites," and "present”-ing relies on a growing consensus among linguists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists regarding the fundamental role of cross-culturally significant gestures, such as pointing, placing, reaching, and beckoning, as a "protolanguage" or "paralanguage" offering a "platform" for the emergence of a specifically linguistic, culturally inflected form of reference. (fn 5) According to Michael Argyle, despite inevitable variations in loco-motor expression and a vast range of cultural inflections, twelve gestures appear to be "very common, or universal" in meaning among all human societies. These include pointing, the halt sign, and beckoning (53). To these I would add the motion of holding something out toward another person, a gesture upon which the meaning of pointing obviously relies.

These gestures are universally understood because unlike the words of a language they arise, directly and without any other material mediation, from the body that all interlocutors don't just "possess" or "have" or "use," like a formal language, but simply are. The act of pointing--an abbreviated form of "placing"--takes a material form, but it is not itself a material sign, except in the most trivial sense. (Peirce would call it an "index." (fn 6)

Pointing does not "stand for" or "refer" to a signified in the manner of a verbal signifier: it does not, for instance, "mean" "pointing." Similarly, unlike formal languages, the paralanguage of placing lacks rules of correct usage: it has no syntax, no lexemes, no parts of speech tagged for a restricted range of combinations. It is incapable of making propositions about things or events, and it "refers" without having a specific referential content or signified, which is to say, placing merely indicates or invites: to "place" a jar in Tennessee, as the speaker does in Wallace Stevens’s droll “Anecdote of the Jar,” is to indicate, invite, call another's attention to a "thing-site," a location where intersubjective discriminations of the object across different horizons of subjective experience and of the discursive universe that each subject inhabits can begin to be negotiated through other acts of "placing" that "gather"--group, juxtapose, replace--other things at the same site: in the case of Stevens’s jar, grayness, bareness, roundness; a hill, a wilderness.

These gatherings set up relations among objects, and between objects and more "iconic" paralinguistic gestures for "eating," "sleeping," "walking," or "looking," as well as verbal utterances. (7) The paralanguage of "placing" thus frames or makes possible a dyadic reciprocity between subjects that is the foundation of formal speech. It derives and persists from our earliest attempts to make sense of the "thingness" of the world, which begins at birth, the instant when we first achieve separation from that world. And the first object that we begin to discriminate at what we might call the foundational "thing-site" of infant experience ("infant" from the Latin for "lacking speech") is the body of the mother and its (her) parts.

Research on mother/infant communication has taken enormous strides in the last two decades. We now recognize in the newborn, and not just in the mother, varying degrees of intentionality and reciprocity, distinct periods of encoding and decoding, rhythms of initiation and response, and the deliberate prolongation of initially reflexive actions--reaching, striking, grasping, eye-movement--as well as pre-cultural expressions of emotion and pre-lingual vocalizations leading to what Colin Trevarthen calls "protoconversations" (129-133) all beginning within the first few weeks of life. These features of mother/infant paralingual communication are, like similar paralingual gestures, universal across cultures, as are those of what researchers have come to call "motherese" --the high, restricted pitch-range and limited syllabary of the mother's vocalizations, for instance, or the closed array of gestures--including tactile--she uses to initiate or prolong paralingual contact with her baby. From this limited exchange of gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations, including gestures of "placing," accompanied by the gradual imposition of voluntary control over facial and other reflexes, the infant begins to enter the intersubjective world of objects discriminated in common, including itself as an embodied subject, an object for other subjects.

Before we have objects or subjects, then, we have "thing-sites," and before we have plural "thing-sites" we have the originary "thing-site"--the mother's body. This is the first object that is "placed" for the newborn--or rather, that places itself in order to draw--or gather--the infant's attention and, just as important, to elicit those specific emotional and loco-motor responses that will, eventually, enable the infant to begin "placing" things as objects for him/herself, as well as for others, both mentally and discursively (Trevarthen 156-58). Reading Steven's "Anecdote" as allegory, we could say that the mother's body is the "jar" that, once it is "placed," makes the "slovenly wilderness" of the infant's undifferentiated experience "surround" it, "no longer wild," but focused and organized into discriminable, locatable objects in a shared world.

Space limitations prevent my exploring this research further here. I invoke it only to question the still prevalent assumption that we cannot discriminate objects at thing-sites we share in common, that we cannot experience the "presence" of things, without relying upon the prediscriminatory intercession of language. Do any of us really believe that only language-users can discriminate one object from another, or one feature from another within a given object? Or that learning to discriminate new objects, or new properties in them, is restricted to the categories imposed on our experience of the world by language? Not only do infants learn within weeks of birth to discriminate mother from others, but we also know from everyday experience that many animals without the least understanding of language, even simple commands, are capable of precise and sophisticated object discriminations, and of shaping their behavior accordingly.

But exactly how does "gathering," in and of itself, enable objective (that is, shared) discriminations of features within the thing as well as between one thing and another, without at some point forcing observers to call upon the supplement of language? Consider immersion techniques for language acquisition, where speaking in one's native tongue is strictly forbidden. Thus, I point to the thing, or rather, I point to the site, I "place" the thing at a site, where an act of object discrimination is to "take place." But once I have directed your attention to the thing-site, do I not need to name what I am pointing to in order to allow you to enter my linguistically determined horizon of experience? I place a Nepalese pot on a table, and say, "pot." But how do I know that you and I are discriminating the same material object at this shared thing-site? Perhaps you really see and understand "brown," or "round," or "copper," or "of a port in air." How do I test for that possibility? By fastening more words to the object we are trying to discriminate?

No. I place, I gather, more things at the same site until, through successive acts of comparison and contrast, we begin to understand each other. This is, in fact, the precise method of the software language-learning program Rosetta Stone, which never displays only one object or event at the "site" of the computer screen, but four, for purposes of comparing and contrasting classes of objects and isolating their specific features or sub-classes: color, size, shape, age, sex, and so on. In short, discrimination of the object at the thing-site can precede naming, although all acts of naming necessarily affect our powers of discrimination.

Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge taught us that we live in "worlds not realized," which I take to include "things not realized," inchoate things awaiting discrimination as objects. They believed we could see infinity in a grain of sand, the extraordinary in the ordinary and vice versa. But we need not go to the poets to refute the claims of lexical hegemonists by stripping away, as Shelley put it, the veil of familiarity from familiar objects. Evidence of the active, everyday, linguistically unmediated, and above all original discrimination of new objects, and of new features in old objects, is all around us. In fashion design, in wine-making, in cuisine, in pop music, in painting, even in the re-painting of your living room, you can learn to discriminate new objects of sense and their specific shades, nuances, and degrees of color, taste, pitch, timbre, rhythmic and melodic and harmonic complexity by a simple process of "gathering"--usually, of comparison and contrast (color wheels, musical scales). You don't taste the tannin in this cabernet? Here, taste this one and compare--what's missing? That's what enologists call "tannin." You may call it whatever you like, now that you have learned to discriminate it.

But what good does it do us, committed as we are to the profession of English language and literature or to the free exchange of ideas in a democracy, to place things physically, as discriminated objects of present sensory experience, when our job is precisely to "place" them derivatively, conceptually and recollectively, in the autonomous, mediating grids of discourse, culture, and history? That’s the real challenge, isn't it? For explanatory narratives--the "anecdotes" we would attach to things, like the one Stevens attaches to his jar and the one I attached to my Nepalese pot at the beginning of this essay--are almost infinitely malleable under the hammers of interpretation.

When it comes to interpreting material objects, as opposed to placing and present-ing them, anything is possible. But not all possibilities are equally probable. In advancing interpretations, we can only deal with the probable, to various degrees, including the probability or improbability of provenance, the lines of descent we have traced for the material clues from which we would derive a literary history, or any history, for that matter. A provenance, too, must take a narrative form.

Meanwhile, however, the material thing endures, patiently awaiting new acts of "placing" and discrimination. Inevitably, the object-discriminations its re-placing incites will be shaped by the questions we wish to put to it, and these questions, in turn, will be shaped by the narratives about similar objects, discriminated at similar sites, that are an inextricable part of our discursive/cultural inheritance. These narratives, both oral and written, will have been influenced by the outcomes of power struggles and ideological conflicts between classes, races, genders, and generations over the course of centuries. As Walter Benjamin has reminded us, history is written by the winners. And yet, the very objects--letters, books, journals, diaries, minutes, charts, maps, constitutions, deeds, chronicles, ruins, monuments, topographies, diplomata, epigraphs, coins—these things that the winners would cite as “object”-ive evidence of the narrative truths that restrict what the losers can say about them, all of them are waiting to be re-placed, re-examined, weighed again, often against newly placed (discovered, gathered, juxtaposed) things.

No merely conceptual, no merely discursive placing of the material thing as a discriminated object can stand as final if it takes place exclusively within the closed horizon of a single discursive or cultural system, or one of its clannish subsets, because material things can always be placed, physically, across the horizons of those systems, and discriminated as objects from other, often quite contrary, perspectives, by subjects posing other, often quite unanticipated, questions. Our existence, not only as a profession and as a discipline, but also, at this dark hour, as a nation of diverse peoples descended from racially and ethnically diverse ancestors and subscribing to widely divergent views of the world, depends utterly on this stubborn, intersubjective persistence of thingness in the material objects over whose stories we will inevitably disagree, to one extent or another.

It is always frustrating not to be heard, humiliating to be silenced. The best solution to being ignored or silenced, however, is to seek to widen, deepen, and variegate the “gathering" around the thing that has been "placed" in question. Opening more pathways to the gathering place, inviting more participants: this is vital to sound scholarship, and sound citizenship. If we are to survive not only as a profession or as a discipline, but as a nation, we must continue to enlarge, as much as possible, the intersubjective horizon whose center lies at every site where the thing in question is to be discriminated as--which is to say, into--an object. Only when all have been invited can the real work begin. What is that real work?

I said that "thing" was Old English for "assembly," but it is also the word for what an assembly is expected to do once it has gathered: to deliberate, to argue, to make and to challenge cases for and against individual opinions and impressions. To set them afloat, yes, but also to weigh them again.

None of us wish to see our most cherished beliefs, not to mention our proudest accomplishments, challenged, let alone overturned. But “placing” things, whether in the here-and-now or in discourse, inevitably opens the door to such an outcome, for it elicits responses that are, fundamentally, unpredictable. And because we are programmed, from birth, to seek responses through acts of placing, and to respond in turn, we are fated to become "response-able," whether we will or no--responsible to, and for, others. As responsible creatures, we are forced to act on probabilities, not absolute (because untested) certainties, nor playful suppositions. As professionals we "profess" not absolute, but moral certainty--what is known in criminal law as persuasion "beyond a reasonable doubt." The legal test of whether or not a doubt is reasonable is whether or not it prevents you from acting on what you believe: in a criminal trial, from giving your individual verdict of guilt. Clearly, with the responsibility attached to judgments based only on probabilities, there sometimes comes great risk. If the person you convict of murder is executed but turns out to have been innocent, who then has blood on their hands? For literary scholars, teachers, and critics in general, as well as for citizens in most walks of life, the consequences of our deliberate judgments are rarely, if ever, so dire. Or at least, so it has been until now.

We are living through a fraught period of our nation’s history where ordinary scholars and educators are facing coercion every day, just as many of their colleagues throughout the world have faced it for decades and centuries. I'm talking not only about grade-school teachers and college professors like those in Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan, who are daily being threatened, tortured, and killed for doing their jobs, but those of us, here in these United States, who dare to speak the truth as we see it despite our current administration’s threats of reprisal—defunding, deportation, denunciation, arbitrary incarceration. Each day, many among us are bravely facing down angry demands to compromise the truth, demands that some of us cannot ignore and that none of us should. These include not just fearsome threats of punishment leveled by tyrants but also the seductive attractions of "getting to yes," and the tedious--often self-jeopardizing, and sometimes even life-threatening--duty of weighing it again.

It is often the latter that pose the greatest danger to clear thinking and courageous resistance.

As for my pot, it still weighs exactly 1150 grams, or five and three-fourths Nepalese paus, just as on the day I bought it. Round and of a port in air, it does not give of boy or buyer. It does not give a damn what either of them thinks, or how often it is weighed.

Notes

1 Of course, the "Jana Andolan" or "People's Movement" of 1990, as well as the new constitution that resulted from its peaceful demonstrations in April of that year, turned out to be but the first step in a longer process of democratization that, on 18 May 2006, culminated in the complete dissolution of the Nepalese monarchy by act of Parliament.

2 The following illustrates the pitfalls of even the most well-meaning forms of enthusiasm.

In 1996, Julie Dock revealed serious problems in the modern editing and re-publication of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," first printed in 1892. Gilman's story had become an important text in feminist studies by the time Dock's essay appeared. It showed how a masculinist ideology could disguise the suffering of the women it oppressed by medicalizing the evidence of that suffering, treating it as a disease symptom to be explained away "scientifically." According to Dock, however, "the textual, publication, and reception histories" of the story "reveal the ways [feminist] critics of the 1970s introduced"--she means, fabricated--"and overlooked evidence. The struggle to gain a foothold for women writers in literary studies and the academy often took precedence over textual criticism and archival research into letters and reviews" (53).

3 "It is as important for the purpose of thought to keep language efficient as it is in surgery to keep tetanus bacilli out of one’s bandages" (Literary Essays, 22).

4 That the Wye was full of industrial pollution in 1798 was a salient "fact" of Marjorie Levinson's ground-breaking New Historicist essay on "Tintern Abbey," "Insight and oversight," published in 1984. Levinson not only misread William Gilpin's reference to the river's silt as an "ouzy tide" of pollution from an ironworks nearby, but failed to "place" the ironworks itself at its proper distance from the Abbey, and was apparently unaware that by July 1798 the works had been shut down for several months due to bankruptcy. For details see Rzepka.

5 In addition to Argyle, see Trevarthen, Beattie, Gallagher, Kenneally, and Gibson.

6 "Indices . . . furnish positive assurance of the reality and the nearness of their objects" writes Peirce. "But with the assurance there goes no insight into the nature of those Objects" (4.531).

7 For the definition and examples of "iconic" gestures and their role in communication, see Beattie, 65-76.

Works Cited

Argyle, Michael. Bodily Communication, 2nd edition. London: Methuen & Co. 1995

Beattie, Geoffrey. Visible Thought: The New Psychology of Body Language. London: Routledge, 2003.

Dock, Julie Bates. "`But One Expects That': Charlotte Perkins Gilman's `The Yellow Wallpaper' and the Shifting Light of Scholarship," PMLA 111.1 (1996): 52-65.

Gibson, Eleanor. "Ontogenesis of the perceived self." In Ulric Neisser, ed. The Perceived Self: Ecological and interpersonal sources of self-knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 25-41.

Heidegger, Martin. "The Thing." In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. and Introd. Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins, 1971. Pp. 163-84.

Kenneally, Christine. The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. New York: Viking, 2007.

Levinson, Marjorie. "Insight and oversight: reading Tintern Abbey." In Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 14-57.

Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. by T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, [n.d.])

Rzepka, Charles. "Pictures of the Mind: Iron and Charcoal, 'Ouzy' Tides and 'Vagrant Dwellers' at Tintern, 1798." Studies in Romanticism 42.2 (2003): 155-185.

Trevarthen, Colin. "The Self born in intersubjectivity: The psychology of an infant communicating." In Ulric Neisser, ed. The Perceived Self: Ecological and interpersonal sources of self-knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 121-73.