Home > Positioning > Close affinity > Aesthetics > Dialogism, pragmatism, deconstruction, cybernetics

Dialogism, pragmatism, deconstruction, cybernetics

In linguistics, social theory, the philosophy of language, and cybernetics, the dynamic of meaning does core work with no aesthetics anywhere in view. Here it is not even a department; it is the load-bearing thing, going by names no one would shelve under art. Look at what is doing the work.

Dialogism, in Bakhtin: a single utterance is already plural — heteroglossia, the many social voices alive in one tongue, and double-voiced discourse, two accents in one word. “The word in language is half someone else’s” — the shared register and the private charge contending inside one sentence. (Behind Bakhtin, Voloshinov’s account of the social sign is carried on the dialogism page.)

Pragmatism, in Dewey: in Art as Experience the aesthetic is the quality of a transaction between a living being and its environment — meaning made in the encounter, not deposited in an object and read off later. Here the dynamic shows as relation itself — the meaning living in the transaction, not in either pole.

Deconstruction, in Derrida: différance — meaning differential and endlessly deferred, for Derrida never coming fully to rest. That it never quite closes is the resonance here; how far meaning nonetheless settles is taken up on the SPLectrum side, not closed in Derrida.

Cybernetics, in Bateson: “a difference that makes a difference” — his definition of information, and of meaning, as purely differential, now at the scale of whole systems. The same differential pole runs in Derrida’s différance and the structuralists’ sign; here it turns up from a wholly different ground, with no aesthetics in sight.

Four grounds — dialogism, pragmatism, deconstruction, cybernetics — and on none of them is the dynamic called aesthetics; it does core work here as the dialogic word, as transaction, as différance, as the difference that makes a difference.

See also: Aesthetics (the surface this belongs to) · Dialogism · Pragmatism · Deconstruction