This essay is … it’s whimsical alright. I came up with while doing some actual research, rereading stuff, and I thought, why not. So, I ended up reading Paul Harrison’s article, ‘Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday’. What caught my attention was how he points out already in the title that sense is not something pre-existing, but rather something that we make.
There’s this divide between the discursive / textual tradition of landscape research, which is often understood as being representational, and affective / embodied tradition of landscape research, which is understood as being non-representational. The former is thought to be important, but out of fashion, kinda passé, whereas the latter is thought to be in fashion. While I get where this is coming from, as I’m not a fan of representational thinking either, I’m kinda surprised how people don’t realize that linguistic approaches to landscape, those that go on and on about discourse and/or text, interdiscursivity and intertextuality, and what have you, can in fact be non-representational.
I also get why people are interested in affect / embodiment. Explaining an experience is not the same thing as an experience. Michel Foucault explains this well in ‘The Order of Things’, when he (9) points out that “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see is never resides in what we say”, just as “it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying”. I think he is also right when he (9) states that “it is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate.” It’s not entirely pointless to explain what we see or, more broadly speaking, what we experience, at any given moment, no, but rather that the explanation of the experience is not the experience itself.
At the same time, I don’t think experience can be separated from language. I think Valentin Vološinov explains this particularly well in ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’. In his (26) view, experience is inseparable from language:
“What sort of reality pertains to the subjective psyche? The reality of the inner psyche is the same reality as that of the sign. Outside the material of signs there is no psyche[.]”
To be clear, he (26) does acknowledge that language is not all there is to reality:
“[T]here are physiological processes, processes in the nervous system…”
That said, it’s like, yeah, but so what, what about it? That doesn’t do anything for us, really. In his (26) words:
“…but no subjective psyche as a special existential quality fundamentally distinct from both the physiological processes occurring within the organism and the reality encompassing the organism from outside, to which the psyche reacts and which one way or another it reflects.”
In other words, psyche, what he also (26) calls inner experience, are not merely physical, material or corporeal, yet it’s not something like a soul either:
“By its very existential nature, the subjective psyche is to be localized somewhere between the organism and the outside world, on the borderline separating these two spheres of reality.”
So, for him, psyche and experience emerge between the human body and the other bodies, including but not limited other human bodies, but this emergence is not physical, as he (26) goes on to add:
“It is here that an encounter between the organism and the outside world takes place, but the encounter is not a physical one: the organism and the outside world meet here in the sign.
So, what is psyche or experience? Well, if you are willing take his word for it, like I do, it is something that emerges in between the bodies, and therefore requires bodies, but isn’t a body, so it’s more like a surface event that is tied to the bodies. In his (26) words:
“Psychic experience is the semiotic expression of the contact between the organism and the outside environment. That is why the inner psyche is not analyzable as a thing but can only be understood and interpreted as a sign.”
In other words, experience is the way we make sense of the world. It requires the human body, in relation to other bodies, but it is not in itself a body, by which I mean a physical, material or corporeal body.
If that doesn’t really make sense to you, Vološinov (26) is able to explain that in a different, perhaps more direct way, in reference to Wilhelm Dilthey’s views on the matter:
“For Dilthey, it was not so much a matter that subjective psychic experience existed, the way a thing may be said to exist, as that it had meaning.”
To this Vološinov (26) then adds that:
“When disregarding this meaning in the attempt to arrive at the pure reality of experience, we find ourselves, according to Dilthey, confronting in actual fact a physiological process in the organism and losing sight of the experience in the meantime—just as, when disregarding the meaning of a word, we lose the word itself and confront its sheer physical sound and the physiological process of its articulation.”
To summarize that, there is no pure or raw experience of reality that we can tap into and it’s not because we don’t know how to tap into it. Instead, it is something emergent and tied to semiotic expression, as he (26) puts it. To simplify that, as he (26) does:
“What makes a word a word is its meaning. What makes an experience an experience is also its meaning.”
Yes, he is, in fact, saying that what we call an experience, whatever it may be, only counts as an experience, because it is meaningful to us. To use his (86-87) example, hunger is an experience, something that tells us that we are in need of food, and it can take many forms, so that for some the semiotic expression is subtle and dealt with by that person, whereas for others it can be straightforwardly expressed as irritation, anger or indignation, depending on the circumstances and one’s apprehension of the circumstances, i.e., whether it is what it is, let’s say a bad harvest, or because there is food, but it isn’t provided to everyone, as he (88-89) goes on to elaborate. In contrast, many of our physiological processes do not count as experiences. They could, under certain circumstances, let’s say because something is painful, but that’s beside the point here.
Vološinov (28) is actually … in my view … surprisingly optimistic about expressing our experiences. He (28) actually wants to emphasize that we can express our experiences:
“[N]ot only can experience be outwardly expressed through the agency of the sign (an experience can be expressed to others variously—by word, by facial expression, or by some other means), but also, aside from this outward expression (for others), experience exists even for the person undergoing it only in the material of signs.”
There are two important things to make note of here. Firstly, as I just pointed out, he is indeed saying that experiences can be expressed. That said, I don’t think he is saying that we can explain our experiences, that is to say what we have experienced, to others, but rather that we express our experiences to others, there and then, when we experience something, inasmuch we are in the company of others. Others may or may not notice that, but that’s because it depends on how we express our experiences. For example, if you stub your toe, you may express that in a word like ‘fuck!’ or with a grimace. I believe that’s what he means. Sure, you can also explain that, like I just did, but that’s not the experience itself, just me explaining how that works. Secondly, this also applies to when we keep the experience to ourselves, when we are alone or when others do not notice it when they are around. Long story short, that’s because speech and what he calls inner speech, what most people would call thinking, are the same thing. In his view, you are always engaging in dialogue, either with other people, in response to what others have said, written, or otherwise expressed, and in anticipation of what others might say, write, or otherwise express, in anticipation of what you are about to say, write, or otherwise express. The distinction between the two types of speech is simply that in inners speech, or thinking, one is simply having an imaginary dialogue, with a real or imaginary person.
He (28) does explain this further, noting that there is no qualitative distinction between experience and expression, because they are one and the same thing, as I pointed out. Then again, I’d say that he is not saying that explanation of one’s experience, like how it felt to be hungry at a certain moment in time in the past, is the experience or the expression of that experience. Instead, he reckons that the experience of hunger is inevitably expressed in a certain way, either to oneself and/or to others, there and then.
He (28-29) also wants to clarify that anything that involves the human body can give rise to experience, which then gives it “semiotic significance” and it “can become expressive.” That said, he (36) also wants to make sure that his readers understand that experience is inseparable from semiotic expression, namely language:
“We do not see or feel an experience—we understand it.”
To return to the summary about his views, speech and inner speech work the same way for him, in the form of a dialogue. To connect that to thinking about ourselves, he (36) adds that:
“This means that in the process of introspection we engage our experience into a context made up of other signs we understand. A sign can be illuminated only with the help of another sign.”
Simply put, when we think about ourselves, we are trying to making sense of our experiences in order to understand them, as he (37) goes on to point out.
Now, you may already know this, but, in his (88) view, the individual is not the basis of experience and therefore there is no individual I-experience, nor self-experience, only we-experience, as he calls them, only we-experience. This doesn’t mean that we don’t experience the world differently, but rather that our experience is contextual and differentiated, as explained by him (88-89). This is also why he (27) largely agrees with Dilthey’s views, but rejects the individual as the starting point:
“Ideology is explained in terms of psychology—as the expression and incarnation of psychology—and not the other way around. True, the psyche and ideology are said to coincide, to share a common denominator—meaning—by virtue of which both the one and the other are alike distinguished from all the rest of reality. But it is psychology, not ideology, that sets the tone.”
Here ideology is basically what someone like Foucault would call discourse., in case you are wondering, because I haven’t explained it here. In any case, for Vološinov, language, be it speech or writing, and other semiotic modes of expression are first and foremost collective and social, in the sense that there is just dialogue, with no beginning, nor end.
Oh, and you don’t even have to be a bit unhinged like me, building on the works Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to realize this. Vološinov is exceptionally good reading in this regard. I tried my best to explain that through him, but others have also stated the same. If you prefer the French academics, you’ll find Foucault pointing this out, how discourse is not just idle talk about what have you but rather coming up with whatever it is that one is talking about. You’ll find him (49) explaining that concisely in ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’, on the last page of chapter three, in part two, known as ‘The Formation of Objects’. If that’s too French, and thus frothy, for your taste, take a look at what J. L. Austin came up with across the channel, how language is not constative, by which he meant descriptive, but rather performative, so that even when we supposedly describe something, we are, in fact, doing something, defining it as such and such. You’ll find him explaining that in his book that has such an apt title, ‘How to Do Things with Words’, that it tells you exactly what you need to know about language, that it is all about doing things with words.
You might now be puzzled. How does anyone do anything with words? Like words don’t do anything. I agree. They don’t. Well, strictly speaking, they don’t. If I say something, it’s just sounds, just some vibration of air. That’s is doing something, with something. That’s physical. That’s material. That’s what people might say is causal. I use my body or, rather, parts of my body to do something, which is the cause, to a certain effect.
That said, there’s more to that. If I say something and you end up doing something, I appear to have done something. It’s like I was the cause, and your action was then the effect and so on, and so forth. Yet, that’s not strictly speaking correct, because, again, that’s just some words. They aren’t physical. They aren’t material. They can’t do anything.
You’ll find Deleuze explaining this in chapter fourteen of ‘The Logic of Sense’. He (94) notes that there’s this double causality. There’s the cause and effect, which is all physical, all material. That’s what he (94) also calls the corporeal cause. You need that for the second cause, which he calls the incorporeal cause, what he (94, 144) also calls the quasi-cause and the incorporeal quasi-cause. He doesn’t use these terms, but I’d say we could call the former also the actual cause and the latter the virtual cause. Why? Well, because the quasi-cause is as if it were the cause. Charles Sanders Peirce (763) would explain ‘Virtual’:
“A virtual X (where X is a common noun) is something, not an X, which has the efficiency (virtus) of an X.”
So, let’s replace the X in his (763) formulation accordingly:
“A virtual [cause] … is something, not [a cause], which has the efficiency of (virtus) of [a cause].
So, no, words don’t cause anything, but they nonetheless function as if they did cause something. In a strange way, they have that capacity, but they are not causes themselves. Okay, Deleuze probably wouldn’t put it that way, so feel free to disagree. I think it’s just a neat way to explain how that works.
To make more sense of that, no pun intended, Deleuze (94-95) mentions liquid, let’s say water or, better yet, a body of water, and points out that what we see is the surface of that liquid, let’s say a glass of water, which, of course owes its existence to liquid molecules. In other words, that water is needed, sure, but we understand it, like literally make sense of that water as something more than that water, for example as a glass of water, or as a puddle, a pool, a lake, or a river, and what not. If you ask me, that is the “‘more’” that Foucault (49) mentions in ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’.
In any case, Deleuze (95) also points out that the quasi-cause is “ideational or ‘fictive’”. Why? Well, because that’s the way it works. That’s the way language works. Ideas aren’t pre-existing, except historically, having been created by people and then taught to other people. Instead, they are created, as I just pointed out. They also don’t mean anything in themselves. What is a jug of water, or a glass of water, or a tumbler of water, or a puddle, or a pool, a lake, a stream, a river, a sea, an ocean anyway? Like when does a stream become a river? When we say so. That’s how it’s all fictive. There are zero facts. In fact, pun intended, facts are only fictions that we call facts because we say so.
Now, to be serious, just because there aren’t any facts except fictions that we call facts, because all language is fictive, that doesn’t mean that language isn’t important. It is. It does things, even if, strictly speaking, doesn’t do anything. Long story short, I am happy to agree that there are physical, material or corporeal causes, and then physical, material or corporeal effects, but all that’s just nonsense if we aren’t capable of making sense of all that, which is why the incorporeal quasi-causes are also needed.
But how is this relevant to Harrison’s article? Well, his article is all about making sense, as indicated in the title of his article. He (498) also quotes Deleuze on the first page and includes references to just about all of his works in the article. So, yeah, that title is totally in homage to Deleuze. I also agree with his take on embodiment and subjectivity in the article, which offers a good summary of how Deleuze and Guattari view bodies and subjectification in their work.
Harrison also says much of the same as Vološinov, albeit in reference to Raymond William’s work. He (498-499) states that experience is typically understood as a noun, so that there is this and/or that experience, or, in plural, these and/or those experiences. This is not to say that this isn’t how people talk about their experiences, like all the time, if prompted to do so, either by others, or by themselves, in thought, but rather that they are treated as these things that occurred, in the past, as he (499) points out. Instead, he’d (502) like people to think that experience is something that takes place, there and then, so that one is being-thus, as he refers to it, instead of being this and/or that, like in reference to something pre-existing, like having this and/or that kind of experience. This is what I’ve tried to point out here, how, in my view, Vološinov isn’t saying in his book that we can transparently explain our experiences to others, just because he reckons that experiences are a matter of expression, but rather that we are capable of expressing what we experience, there and then, and often we cannot help but to express ourselves, there and then, like when we stub our toe, or the like. Cursing or grimacing aren’t explanations of this and/or that experience, but rather the expression or, to use Austin’s term, the performance of a certain experience, which others are typically able to understand, as all experience is collective in Vološinov’s view. This is something that Harrison (514) points out. There’s also a degree of similarity between what I’ve already explained, namely through Austin’s work, and what Harrison (503) has to say about language.
I think that’s enough for now. There’s certainly more to Harrison’s article and, perhaps, I’ll return to cover it more. It’s an interesting reading. I mostly agree. It is also difficult reading, because, to his credit, he clearly knows what’s that. I mean, I like to think I know a lot, but, yeah, he knows even more.
References
- Austin, J. L. ([1955] 1962). How to Do Things with Words (J. O. Urmson, Ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
- Deleuze, G. ([1969] 1990). The Logic of Sense (C. V. Boundas, Ed., M. Lester and C. J. Stivale, Trans.). London, United Kingdom: Athlone Press.
- Foucault, M. ([1969/1971] 1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (A. M. Sheridan Smith and R. Swyer, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
- Foucault, M. ([1966] 1994). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
- Harrison, P. (2000). Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday. Environment and Planning D: Society of Space, 18 (4), 497–517.
- Peirce, C. S. (1902). Virtual. In J. M. Baldwin (Ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. II (pp. 763–764). New York, NY: The Macmillan Company.
- Vološinov, V. N. ([1927] 1976). Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (N. H. Bruss, Ed.; I. R. Titunik, Trans). New York, NY: Academic Press.