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[13a] Philip Pilkington, ‘Fake Experience and Talking’ Art-Language New Series No. 3, September, 1999, pp. 11-15.

I want to consider some of the contingencies of meaning production (and its identical twin ‘interpretation’) and relate them to the rather simplistic idea that Art & Language (A & L) can be viewed as a ‘gang’ of ironists, marginal with regard to the cultural superstructure. The meta-irony of (or within) A & L as a gang of ironists is that the culturally and historically dispossessed can indeed possess an illocutionary force that is de haute en bas.

What may also be interesting to pursue here is the notion that those conversational practices such as A & L’s, which are marginal because outside the formalised protocols of the cultural superstructure (in AL’s case quite deliberately), are close to a logical form of anarcho-syndicalism. (I take it as axiomatic that the cultural superstructure is a mere imprint of the superstructure.) This is not to claim a political or moral space of some superiority for conversational practices conceived as anarcho-syndicalist, nor is it merely to offer a description of practice within an underdeveloped or historically backward mode of production (like art). Historical location may suggest that some of the social and economic conditions of production for A & L were and are syndicalist,  in that they satisfy the conditions of being removed from a class base. A generalised model of conversational meaning production/interpretation as anarcho-syndicalist is at least more interesting than a Weberian Realpolitik binary of elites and their dysfunctional ‘others’. And there are indeed aspects of syndicalism – such as identity, shifting telos, localised-to-generalised interests, reflexive truth conditions, fuzziness of membership, etc. – which might be used to stereotype A & L as syndicalist. My suggestion is that the model of syndicalism is also appropriate for typing conversational practices in general.

This may be no more than a spin on The Philosophical Investigations, but the ways conversational practices are thrown into and become embedded within those discourses and practices which are protocol-ridden, normal and hegemonic suggest that the former are often outrageously opaque to the latter. And unlike the protocol-ridden practices of bureaucracy and its cognates, syndicalist activities do take their own commodifications (the how of their reification) to be functionally internal. This is (almost) to describe a classical view of (and reaction to) ‘alienation’. One may indeed lack control over one’s production. It does not follow that one is forces to submit to the new and cognitively wasteful academy of dumb anomie,  pis-aller resignation or egomanic solipsism. The alienation of the meaning of a practice is not just its commodification and, insofar as it is not, it is not external to that practice. In short, the commodification process and its contingent conditions are recursively included within the conversational syndicalist practice.

There are historical and logical heir-lines constitutive of conversational practices which have a strange relationship with the meanings which that practice may generate in being alienated. That strangeness is partly a result of the fact that alienated meanings are a subset of the meanings that belong to or remain within the conversational practice. In saying this, I do not suggest a metaphor for how it feels to have no control over the products or consequences of one’s activity – but rather an attempt to describe the logical (and other) features of conversational practices.  Among these logical features is a tendency for meanings alienated by or from conversational practices not to be symmetrical in translation. An example of this asymmetry is as follows: in alienating the meaning of ‘pain’ a conversational practice could and would do nothing about the possibility that, whereas the conversation itself assigned the meaning ‘hurt’ or ‘discomfort’ to the word, someone outside might assign it the meaning ‘something that the French eat a lot of’.  Another possibility is, of course, attached to irony.  An A & L-type conversation might include such expressions as ‘that is an exquisite scherzo in black and white’.  The meaning of this might be alienated so as to mean exactly what that sentence literally means. But that meaning would never translate back into the conversation.

It is not enough to characterise the drolleries of the malapropisms to be found in recent A & L work as forms of elaborate and extenuated duck-rabbit illusions. There is a sense in which they may seem to be perlocutionary accidents, florid, wordsalads. But A & L’s form of malapropism seems a bleak (if pre-emptive) method of coping with an inability to prevent meanings attributed to one’s practice becoming logically and historically alien to it.

The performative constructs of malapropism are a form of critique of meanings; a critique that will go ‘out of control’. A hazy outline of what is happening is that the process of producing meanings internal to the conversation or practice has a set of the intensional modalities operating (belief, time-space, obligation, necessity, etc.) which it divides from the external processes of interpretation – these latter being non-intensional contingencies. The division is necessary for the processes under description. These malapropisms are not a lampoon of arrivist pretensions by means of a kind of translation with illocutionary mini-infarction of conventional texts or discourse. There is a horror in the critique, in the malapropisms and the taxonomic confusions: a horror that the conventional text or discourse is itself scrambled and a-priori (historically deeper) malapropism. The horror is that the conventional (with its generative rules, lexical items and categories) may stand in as a counterfactual world in relation to actual historical practices, but that it is nevertheless considered (conventionally!) as the strong candidate for a realism of meanings – insofar as it is conventional (has adumbrated rules, etc.).

I’m not trying to suggest any sort of deep-grammar malapropism (‘colourless green’, etc.) in A & L’s strategic/satirical position. What is interesting about A & L’s (stoic?) resolution is the connection between alienated meaning products and the failures or corruptions in translation between meanings internal and external to a practice. There is a depth, however, of a semantical kind to A & L’s corrupting translations, and it implies differences of ontology. That is, the conventions of realism are founded in fictions, phantoms, misunderstandings, Meinongian categories, absurdity, etc. (Not duck-rabbit, but duck-cockatrice.)

Anarcho-syndicalist practice must handle loss of control over meaning/ practice as a matter of necessity. There is a connection between loss of control over meaning and the contingency of meaning. The connection between the two is related to the ‘hard problem’ of  the existence of consciousness/experience. This no mere analogy. That is, you cannot have a fading in and out of a specifically limited or describable qualia: you either have the experience and all the modalities that go with it – or you don’t. (Imagine that ‘learning’ is also joining, membership or participation.) Not that consciousness research has answers which might overcome some of the intensional modalities relating symbols to meanings. It cannot make art (or conversation) rational or ‘efficient’. It has no answers to the ‘hard problem’. It avoids the hard problem as a mystery for non-materialists only. However, it does have a repertoire of obstacles to solving the ‘hard problem’ which sets out formidable reasons why we should expect meanings to be out of control.

There is a vanity in art discourse and its related practices which causes it to succumb to a form of protocolism. That is, the ‘inescapable tyranny of meaning’ is determined by the intended and/or interpreted senses of the object-as-symbol, resting on what amounts to no more than a set of continuingly emerging conventions (and, here, their distortion by A & L). The strategists-cum-creatures of such protocolist understanding are members of the interrelated hegemonies of academic convention and commodity marketeering. Both groups have a strong but misplaced confidence in the well-formed relations between the semiotic and the experiential. Careers, social power, academic performance-indicators – and much else besides – depend upon the stability of relations between symbols and qualia.

The pairing of symbols and experience is fraught with regressive steps which justify what is in fact a legitimation. The process cannot be frozen to allow a ‘semiotic of qualia’; the pairing of symbol and experience continues to entrench or etiolate as it  continues on its recursive way. The functional conditions of continuing are prior to or of greater interest than any output into signs, objects, etc., conceived as friendly tokens of meanings. Another difficulty (or frustration) is that the functional conditions of practice are still understood in Kantian terms: experiential qualia are critical judgements made within the locale of categorical imperatives. We’ve just not been able to get much further. To consider symbols (etc.) as having a functionality over experience is to assume a division of experience for which we have no evidence, and then to fill the gaps with pet homunculi. This splitting not only impairs the causal power of the semiotic, but also the conventional (the semantic) and the authentic intentional (the psychological) as well. It may not matter if the intentional is dropped in favour of a (very) elaborate set of sign conventionalities, if you do want to make a micro-Stalinist realism – and if you can internalise the given conventions in lieu of a set or series of qualia. But then every experience of a sign (object, etc.) would be like an exam on a set text without the possibility of or possible awareness of a counterfactual belief that (say) William Golding is an execrable writer. Anecdotal evidence may suggest that some go to exhibitions (and other culturally related events) to erase or to add some kind of intensional content – in the jargon of consciousness studies. But what counts as evidence are in fact fake qualia – the non-experiential experiences of zombies.

Much of the above has been the result of wondering if the meanings generated in a specific historical locale could be coherently captured or characterised as a sort of language. And further, it has been the result of wondering whether the language could be represented in some way so as to form a basic mentalese:  the language L is in these works, objects, etc., and the meanings emerge from that mentalese. The wondering was prompted by exposure to various attempts at a materialistic description of meaning and consciousness/experience; one which would secure against loss of control over meanings and determining qualia through the functional power of signs and symbols. This is a doomed project. The materialism that remains is of an historical locale of meaning production. The essentialism of a ‘language of x’ (A & L, or other unsightliness, etc.) is an attractive way of collapsing the binary  (even the dualistic?) idea of meaning (even including the fantasy of mentalese) and the symbolic into the one category of the symbolic. The notion of the symbolic as meaning-laden is paradigm-driven, and the paradigmatic is conventional to the core. An accusation can be made by materialists, fans of robotics, etc., that to believe that qualia are (composed of) a complexity of meanings is to believe folk psychology. At least in the conversational practice to which I refer, the belief is not in a Herrenvolkischen  psychology.