INEFFABILITY, CREATIVITY, AND COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE

Abstract: Some individuals in all human cultures and ages have believed some or all of their experiences to be beyond adequate expression. Many have nonetheless attempted to present or evoke some aspect of these experiences for others through communication. To do so without implicitly contradicting one's belief that the experiences are ineffable requires that the communicator creatively adapt message and/or context in a manner likely to conflict with conventional standards of communication competence, interpersonal rules and expectations, logic, or aesthetic tastes.

Extracts:

"The person struck by the ineffability of his experiences may nonetheless be moved to attempt expression or communication by a number of motivations. If sufficiently impressed by the magnificence and uniqueness of his vision, he may seek to translate or evoke its effect for others through artistry. He may seek to reach others who have shared similar experiences, or to proselytize for others to join in recreation. Less exotically and more commonly, he may simply seek to exalt and demonstrate the effects of unusually moving and highly personal experience.

The potential communicator in any of the pursuits is likely to depart from conventional notions of competence. Social scientists and rhetoricians alike have generally sought for regularities in human communication sufficient to produce standards by which communicator performance might be evaluated. Rhetorical critics have usually placed a premium upon the accurate transferral of ideas through informative and persuasive messages. Communicologists have often modeled and critiqued communicator performance according to an ideal of optimal transmission and reception. [...]

A curious problem is posed by the person, who, because of perceived ineffability, examines the normal system for efficient expression and finds it unsuitable (either generally or for the expression of a particular experience). If he attempts expression despite his misgivings, he must fall prey to what Christopher Johnstone has termed "the rhetorical paradox" an inconsistency between text and context, aims and means. His logical response may be to attempt the alteration, circumvention, or subjection of the expressive system. This decision would, of course, bear dramatic effects upon the nature of "messages" produced, and would almost certainly run afoul the traditional standards of communicative competence.

Four general communication strategies may be identified for those faced with perceived ineffability:

1. partial or total silence;

2. explicitly qualified expression;

3. poetic evocation; and

4. self-destructive antiexpression.

In its attempt to escape the rhetorical paradox through cultivated imprecision, ambiguity, self-deprecation, or obscurity, each breaks with conventional dictates of expressive competence. Our acceptance of these strategies as rational and successful responses to a problematic rhetorical situation would argue for reform of these standards."

Silence

Although the mainstream of Western culture has placed high value upon articulate expression, numerous ethnographic studies have revealed significant differences in the values according to speaking and language among other cultures and subcultures. In some cultures, the distinction between the unspeakable and the ineffable is far less pronounced than in our own. Speech is rare, for example, among the Indian Paliyans, and virtually nonexistent for those over the age of forty. Paliyans who talk too much are social deviants, treated with brusqueness or overt penalties. The mature Apache is expected to "give up on words." The Trappist or Zen initiate who persists in talking is expelled. Although the reasons differ, Paul Goodman explains, "In these traditions speaking as such implies intervention, presumptuous assertiveness, definition, cutting the world down to size, vulgarizing, blasphemy, black magic."

" Verbal transcendence is seen by numerous religious traditions as a prerequisite for spiritual advancement. The proper state of mind for spiritual enlightenment is termed "sitting-in-forgetfulness" or a "fast of the mind" by the Taoist, "emptiness" or "no-mind" by the Buddhist and Hindu. Where dominant western culture views silence as a negative condition--the absence of sound--some cultures and individuals view silence as a positive reality and sound as the absence of silence, a perceptual veil. The chinese Quietist Kuan Tzu advised his followers to "throw open the gates, put self aside, bide in silence, and the radiance of the spirit shall come in and make its own." Neither is the absence of verbal expression always seen as the denial of communication. Silence may betoken experience, sincerity, and the path to initiation. An Apache saying proclaims: "It is not the case that a man who is silent says nothing."

Several quietists alternatives to total silence exist. Most notable among these are occult expression, partial silence, and ritualized or shared experience.

Interpersonal silence implies neither total silence nor the absence of communication. Private and occult art, the secret expression between man and the object of his spiritual development, has a prominent place in many outwardly silent cultures. Edmund Carpenter's study of "silent music and invisible art" among American and Canadian Indians found that artistic responses to vision are rarely displayed in public. Visions among these tribes are viewed as private, ineffable, and unspeakable. They are held to imbue the recipient with secret power and special spiritual status in the tribe. Older sages may hint of their visions through a well-chosen and ambiguous movement in dance, but their exact nature remains undisclosed. Sharing of visionary knowledge is believed to threaten" both its ownership and the very nature of that knowledge." Public exposure violates the essential character of the revelatory transaction, threatening diminution of power and making the vision open to "theft" by others. Some tribes Carpenter examined never (so far as we know) create concrete representations of their private visions. In others, representations are created in ways (such as medicine bundles) that allow the object to remain hidden.

*keep in mind the psychedelic experience is essentially ritualistic in nature. The experience is entirely in the form of ritual. Read these paragraphs and relate.

Ritual permits the individual to communicate while maintaining personal and expressive silence. Through ritual the mask of symbolic representation and its wearer become fully identified with the mythical being or force they represent. Secular logic is abandoned in favor of the religious experience as experienced. Suzanne Langer argues that the function of ritual is similar to expression. "It is primarily an articulation of feelings," she claims, whose ultimate product "is not a simple emotion but a complex, permanent attitude."

This process may be more clearly identified as communication, antiexpressive in several important respects. It brooks no explanation, no discussion, no nonritualized talk. It communicates not through verbal expression but through shared recreation of experience. Edmund Carpenter believes that competent performance of this communicative function is the hallmark of the tribe, a group "whose shared knowledge permits communication through secrecy."

Without this shared experiential and communicative base, quietism runs certain risks as an alternative to expression. Silence, more than any of the other communicative options for one faced with perceived ineffability, risks interpretation, which in this case is almost inevitably misinterpretation. The risks, althrough great, may still be regarded as smaller than those entailed by straightforward expression. As the silent philosopher Cratylus might have responded to those who criticized his rhetorical choice: "I shall allow some large misunderstanding of me due to my silence to take the place of the sound and the fury of the thousands of small misunderstandings that argument might bring about."

Qualified Expression

[...] Practical ineffability functions as an explicit theme in many commmunicative episodes. Through the suggestion of ineffability one may seek to lessen one's personal responsibility for the communicative attempts, insure some degree of aesthetic distance in an auditor's consideration of a message, or bring the concept of ineffability into focus as the subject of communication.

Insecure conversationalists often frame their statements with proclamations of practical ineffabiliy, such as "I just can't tell you" (e.g., how excited I am), or "words are inadequate to convey" (e.g., my heartfelt sympathy). In private conversation, such qualifiers are commonly interpreted as demonstrations of sincerity and depth of feeling rather than proof of communicator incompetence.

Communicators may broaden their use of qualification to encompass objects and expreiences we normal regard as expressible. The Beats introduced many descriptive statements with the annoying sland "like," a constant reminder that expressive attempts must be understood as bearing a problematic relationship to the experience rather than perfectly consitituting or capturing it. Gramatologist Jaques Derrida crosses out words in his published texts to tlessn our reliance upon his descriptive terminology. The T'ang Dynasty poert Han Shan often demanded his audience's attention only to disappoint:

My mind is like the autumn moon

Shining clean and clear in the green pool.

No, that's not a good comparison.

Tell me, how shall I explain?

Qualification succeeds to the extent that it remains obtrusive without destroying our interest in the expressive attempt of object. As the conversational qualifiers have become more common and acceptable, they have lost their obtrusiveness. Similarly, the Beat use of "like" lost its ability to focus the listener's attention upon the problematic nature of expression when it became a slang fad with indiscriminate application.

[...] Stapledon sought expressive forms that would preserve the delicate balance of visionary insight and recognition of cognitive and linguistic inaccuracy. It is this cultivated tension between vision and expression that pervades Stapledon's fictional works [...]

The reader's interest is sustained through the grandeur of the image fragments nevertheless attained and through a developed intrigue with the expressive situation of the narrator. The reader may forgive the narrator's cosmic stammering because the gains a sense of the immensity of Stapledon's vision and the hopelessness of more satisfactory articulation. Stapledon used language but distrusted it; he sought to transcend the ordinary limits of expression by raising our awareness of them.

Poetic Expression

M.L. Rosenthal calls poets the "verbal antennae of a people," individuals who are able and/or relied upon to respond to and communicate experiences of the common body. Those struck with the inadequacies of common language in dealing with uncommon experiences have often viewd the arts as our most viable communication option, the apogee of man's visionary and communicative talents. [...]

Poetry is the supreme accomplishment of verbal competence; demonstrating, when successful, the ability of a communicator to determine and creatively accomplish interactive aims. The competence of the poe, as with more common communicators, relies upon the presence and strength of certain attributes, such as sensitivity, contextual understanding, communicative repertoire, and the ability to adapt these means creatively or invent new ones where necessary.

The one common experience of poets lies in the necessary confrontation with the limits of conventional expression and the available means of unconventional communication. Paul Goodman characterized poets as those who "understand, more than most people, what cannot be said, what is not being said though it ought to be, what is verbalized experience and what is mere words." The communicative competence of poets is based upon their ability to understand and adapt to this tension between vision and expression.

The attempt of the poet to transcend the inadequacies of conventional expression in communicating his experience is represented by two distinct techniques and philosophies of poetic craft: linguistic purification and literary indirection.

Poets trying to "purify the language of the tribe" through "direct" expression seek to strip words, thoughts, and images of their normal associations and uses. The Russian Formalists described such poetic competence as "defamiliarization," the ability to "make strange" our experience through phenomenal reduction and reconstruction. The French Impressionists are exemplary of this approach in the visual arts, restoring the vivicity of color and form and the significance of immediate sense-experience. Rimbaud and the Illuminists strove to create much the same effect in language through "celebrations of perpetual amazement at the brightness of things." Woolf, Joyce, and Kerouac, among others, experimented with spontaneous composition. Grammatic construction, narration, and sometimes even revision were seen as diminishing the power of raw vision. "Time being of the essence int he purity of speech," insisted Kerouac, "sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image."

The modes of indirect expression are more frequently relied upon to resolve the conflict between vision and expression. Indirection maintains a purposeful ambiguity and transience of image and interpretation, evolving in more of a symbolic than a significant fashion. [...]

Metaphor and myth are the most common devices of indirect expression; the most evocative yet "nonlinear" of literary creations. Metaphor is the basic operation of symbolism. It is an unconventional fusion of images which, if successful, may inexplicably produce a new image, attitude, or experience. [...] When a metaphor "works," it has managed to avoid the logical process of comparison; tenor and vehicle are one for an instant. [...] When a metaphor stops astonishing, when it ceases to evoke an unreasoned but vivid juxtaposition, it dies. When metaphors are repeated they may behin to function as signs of particular qualities and relationships, thus ceasing to function as metaphors. Myth is the milieu of living metaphor, a dimension of implicitness complementing, coalescing, or replacing (in a limited sense) what is explicit in our expressions.

The existence of poetry as a discrete communicative mode confirms and depends upon doubts of expressibility in ordinary language. Poetry does not answer these problems; it exposes them.

Marcuse [...] urged [...] that we learn to subvert the existing forms and forums of communication. "The senses must learn not to see things anymore in the medium of that law and order which has formed them; the bad functionalism which organizes our sensibility must be smashed."

Individuals and groups aspiring to the "rhetoric of liberation" have generally employed two forms of subversion: Formal subversion, an assault on the contexts and standards of expression; and rhetorical subversion, the attempt to undermine literal interpretation and acceptance of the communication through internal textual figures.

Formal Subversion:

Acts of communication take place within the context of expectation and conventions. A communicator may try to challenge (or "smash") these contexts through calculated inappropriateness. [...]

Surrealism internalized the process of contextual conflict through its selection and juxtaposition of subject matter. Because its products were designed to provoke rather than to expression vision, surrealism avoided the rhetorical paradox. As critic C.W.E. Bigsby has remarked:

"For the surrealist the image is not an expression of the ineffable; it creates the ineffable. The surrealist writer is not inspired; he is inspirer. The image does not represent a state of mind or a heightened sensibility. It is a springboard to freedom which is simultaneously both means and an end. The confrontation of disparate ideas and words serves to break the analogical mode of the mind and liberate the imagination. The surrealist, then, is not interested in the nature of the flints; his concern is with the spark."

Rhetorical Subversion: [not extracted yet]

[...]

Communication Competence

The sense of ineffability appears to be prompted by a combination of the perceived significance of the visionary event, the uniqueness of the experience, and the significance assigned to its communication. Unlike the conventional portrait, this suggests that it may sometimes be the most, rather than the least, competent language users who are struck with ineffability, if for no other reason than that they are most likely to be aware of the limits of normally competent expression. "Most of us would fail to be aware of, or would simply ignore, what we could not conceptualize," writes Galen Pletcher; "but to a few individuals the reality of such things might be brought home in such a way that they could not ignore it."

Not all who creatively deviate from expressive norms succeed in transforming the expectation of their auditors. The visionary is inevitably an "outsider" in the developed cultures insistent upon cogent expression and the democratization of knowledge. Visionaries have been burned as witches, revered as prophets, locked up as lunatics, feted as artists, and canonized as saints. Depending upon the society's tolerance and receptivity or the artist's communicative competence in reforming these, responses run the gamut from outrage to awe, confusion to comprehension, and from rejection to inspiration. [...] Ineffability is more than a source of deviant communicative behavior; it offers an opportunity to test our most basic assumptions in aesthetic and scientific investigation of communication.