It is not by chance that Lakoff is one of those authors who have begun to elaborate, on the fragments of a semantics where definition was based on atomic properties, a semantics in which definition is represented in the form of a sequence of actions.
One of the pioneers of this tendency (who recognized his Aristotelian debts) was Kenneth Burke with his Grammar, Rhetoric, and Symbolism of Motives, where philosophy and literature, and language, were analyzed in “dramatic” form, through a combined game using Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose.
Not to mention Greimas, who makes no effort to conceal the fact that a theory of narrativity presides over semantic understanding—I am thinking of that Case Grammar that works on a semantic structure in terms of Agent, Counter-Agent, Goal, Instrument, etc. (Fillmore, Bierwisch), * and of many models used in Frames Theory and in Artificial Intelligence. Dominique Noguez has recently published an amusing hoax (in which I am both hero and victim) on the Semiology of the Umbrella. He did not know that reality is stranger than fiction and that one of the models in artificial intelligence is that of Charniak, who, in order to explain to a computer how to interpret the sentences where the word “umbrella” appears, supplies a narrative description of what one does with an umbrella, how one handles it, how it is made, and what purpose it serves.†’ The concept of umbrella is boiled down to a network of actions.
Aristotle did not manage to match his theory of action with that of definition, because, imprisoned by his own categories, he thought there were substances that preceded every action they allowed or had to undergo. We had to wait for the crisis of the concept of substance to rediscover a semantics implicit not in his works on logic but in those on ethics, poetics, and rhetoric, and to think that even the definition of essences could be articulated in terms of underlying actions.
And yet Aristotle could have developed a suggestion from Plato’s Cratylus. We know that that work presents the myth of the Nomotheta, or “name giver,” a sort of Adam of Greek philosophy. But the problem, which went back to before Plato, was whether the names given by the Nomotheta were provided according to convention (nomos) or because they were motivated by the nature of the things (physis). The question as to which of the two solutions Socrates (and through him Plato) opted for has generated and still generates endless pages of commentary on the Cratylus. But whatever the answer, every time he seems to adhere to the theory of “motivation,” Plato speaks of cases where the words represent not the thing in itself but, rather, a source or result of an action. The strange difference between the nominative and genitive in Zeus/Dios is due to the fact that the original name expressed an action, “di’hon zen” (he through whom life is given).
Similarly, it is said that “anthropos” can be reduced to “he who is capable of reconsidering what he has seen,” inasmuch as the difference between man and animals is that man does not just perceive but can reason and reflect on what he has perceived. We are tempted to take Plato’s etymology seriously when we remember that Thomas Aquinas, when considering the classical definition of man as a mortal and rational animal, maintained that specific differences such as “rationality” (which distinguishes man from every other species of living thing) are not atomistic accidents but names we give to sequences of actions and behaviors through which we recognize that there is a rationality in a certain creature that is not perceptible in other ways. Human rationality is inferred from symptoms, so to speak, like talking and expressing thoughts. We know our faculties “ex ipsorum actuum qualitate,” from the quality of the actions of which the faculties are origin and cause.*
According to one of Peirce’s examples, lithium is not defined merely by its position in a periodic table of elements nor by its atomic number but through the description of the operations that must be carried out in order to produce a sample of it.† If the Nomotheta had known and named lithium, he would therefore have invented an expression that could, like a hook, capture a whole series of accounts of sequences of actions. He would have seen, say, tigers not as individuals embodying “tigerness” but rather as animals able to develop certain behaviors, interacting with other animals and in a particular environment—and this story would have been inseparable from its own protagonist.
With these reflections I have perhaps strayed too far from Aristotle, but I was still on the track of his suggestions about action.
In any case, the conference was devoted to contemporary strategies of appropriation of antiquity, and every act of appropriation implies a certain amount of violence. Just as I am convinced that Kant said the most interesting things on our cognitive processes not in the Critique of Pure Reason (where he was speaking in fact of cognition) but in his Critique of Judgment (where he seems to be discussing art), in the same way why should we not go and look for a modern theory of knowledge not (or at least not only) in Aristotle’s Analytics but also in the Poetics and Rhetoric?
Abbreviated version of a paper presented at the conference “Les Stratégies contemporaines d’appropriation de l’Antiquité,” held at the Sorbonne in October 1990. The proceedings were published as Nos grecs et leurs modernes, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
THE AMERICAN MYTH IN THREE ANTIAMERICAN GENERATIONS
The extract that follows is taken from l’Unità, 3 August 1947, at the start of the cold war. I remind you that l’Unità was the official daily paper of the Italian Communist Party, which was at that time heavily committed to celebrating the triumphs and virtues of the Soviet Union and to criticizing the vices of Americas capitalist culture:
Around 1930, when Fascism began to be “the hope of the world,” some young Italians happened to discover America in American books, an America that was thoughtful and barbaric, happy and quarrelsome, dissolute, fertile, laden with all the world’s pasts, and at the same time young and innocent. For a few years these young men read, translated, and wrote with a joy of discovery and rebellion that made official Fascist culture indignant, but their success was such that it forced the regime to tolerate it in order to save face…. For many people the encounter with Caldwell, Steinbeck, Saroyan, and even with old Sinclair Lewis opened up the first chink of freedom, the first suspicion that not everything in the world’s culture came down to the Fasces….At this point American culture became something very serious and precious for us, a sort of enormous laboratory where with a different kind of freedom and different methods people pursued the same goal of creating a taste, a style, a modern world that the best among us were seeking, perhaps with less immediacy but with just as much stubborn determination…. We noticed, during those years of study, that America was not another place, a new start in history, but just the giant theater where everyone’s drama was played out with greater openness…. At that time American culture allowed us to see our own dramas being worked out as though on a giant screen…. We could not take part openly in the drama, in the tale, in the problem, so we studied American culture a little bit like we study past centuries, Elizabethan theater, or the poetry of the dolce stil novo.
The author of this article, Cesare Pavese, was already a famous writer, a translator of Melville and other American writers, and a Communist. In 1953, in the introduction to a posthumous collection of Pavese’s essays (he had committed suicide), Italo Calvino, who was then a member of the Communist Party (which he left at the time of the Hungarian crisis), expressed the feeling of left-wing intellectuals toward the United States in these terms:
America. Periods of discontent have often witnessed the birth of a literary myth that sets up a country as a term of comparison, as in Tacitus’s or Mme de Staël’s re-creation of Germany. Often the country discovered is only a land of Utopia, a social allegory that has barely anything in common with the real country; but despite this it is just as useful, indeed the aspects that are emphasized are the very ones the situation needs…. And this America invented by writers, hot with the blood of different races, smoky with factory chimneys and with well-watered fields, rebellious against church hypocrisies, shouting with strikes and masses in revolt, really did become a complex symbol of all the ferments and realities of the time, a mixture of America, Russia, and Italy, along with a taste of primitive lands—an unresolved synthesis of everything Fascism tried to deny and exclude.
How could it have come about that this ambiguous symbol, or,
