Porter, Kevin J. Meaning, Language, and Time: Toward a Consequentialist Philosophy of Discourse. West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2006. Print. Summary:Porter also demonstrates the importance of defining what is going to be discussed or not discussed within a work as it shows that he is not unaware of certain topics but that they are not going to be examined in this work. He raises questions about meaning and how it is created and how we are transformed by it as well (49). Regarding signs, he states that “[t]he meaning of a sign is in its consequences” before moving on to examine consequentialism claims (52). He also addresses scriptures and some of the claims regarding interpreatation or misinterpretation, such as why someone could misinterpret what God has (or has someone else) written (78). Particularly interesting is his (Wittgenstein) example of how meaning creates the world and the limitations for different types of representation (whether words or images, etc.) (93).Response:“In contrast, I argue that events can prefigure other events only after the fact—i.e., prefiguration is, in essence manufactured by a retrofitting a subsequent even onto the antecedent event so that the former appears to prophesies the latter. For meaning consequentialism, then, for one sign to prefigure another sign requires a future effort on the part of those interpreting the signs” (73). In a similar way this made me think of White’s concept that history is not a sequence of events that clearly point from one event to the next (like a line of dominoes), but that history is a narrative construction made in the future. So I would concur that in this way Porter is right that prefiguration is an action in the future of the events being considered, although to present it is happening in the present about the past. This concept seemed especially useful as it influenced how I had been reflecting about the narrative arcs told to us in classes of the major movements in rhetoric and composition while working on my exam lists. In this way it makes me more aware of the prefiguration that I am about to construct in my own understanding of the discipline.Connections/Questions:One of these consequentialism claims is that “Utterances and their consequences are subjected to discipline—that is, they must be made docile, useful, and predictable, as must human beings” (56). This clearly relates to what we have read by Foucault and the constricting into an ordered form. It is even similar to the enframing of Heidegger in this regard as well. Later on even writes about Heidegger regarding emotions not as representations but the thing itself and by extension, “our experience of objects being ready-to-hand in relation to our concerns is ontologically prior to our experience of objects-in-themselves” (109). He also mentions Adorno and Horkheimer’s work when considering the questions of scripture interpretation and their theories concerning the Enlightenment (91). |
Quotations:“The experience of time is, rather, a “dissension” of the soul into its tripartite aspects of memory, awareness, and expectation” (72). “For Wittgenstein, the photograph (i.e., the representations of the book, table, and dog) share a form in common with the represented state of affairs. That is, the objects represented in the photograph are related to n one another in a way that corresponds to the way in which the actual object are related to one another; and what they share is a “logical for” (2.18). However, there are limitations to what a representation represents; it cannot, Wittgenstein says, represent its form as a representation, but can only display that form. This is the doctrine of showing (4.121)” (93). |
