> Communication is often
> intended
> to decrease or eliminate understanding. Unless by
> accident
> or divinely given, communication must have arisen as
> a
> method of affecting the behavior of others, which
> will often
> be unrelated to the other's understanding. Even
> rather
> primitive organisms can be observed practicing
> deception.
It can work both ways, when the question of self-deception comes in. Take the example of a type of modern lyric poem, drawing from the romantic lyric, which seems to problematize Habermas' model as I'm gleaning it from these posts (haven't read Habermas). Traditionally the lyric is "overheard" by a reader, rather than addressed directly to a reader by the writer. The poet is writing/speaking to herself by way of, for instance, a landscape, and the reader happens by and overhears it. There's no basis for gauging intentional intersubjective truth/deception value, even if one attributes intersubjective manipulative intent to the poet's particular manipulation of the traditional techniques and material, which aren't top secret. And the reader of the lyric, I would think, would want to be affectively manipulated to a degree.
So, the lyric poet addresses himself: if there is deception, it's self-deception. And if the reader feels deceived in a bad way something's wrong with the reading model, or the understanding of the *value* of this particular "deception." This calls for an other than quantitative model of increasing or decreasing understanding, because it's still a kind of communicative action, it seems to me. As (indirect) instrumental action, which is an equally crude model for evaluating it, one of it's goals would be enjoyment for the reader.
How does this fit the ISS model?
Here's a bit of history from the _Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics_, "Lyric" entry, p. 462
. . . Contemporary critics, predicating the musical essence of the l. as its vital characteristic, have come close to formulating an exact, inclusive definition of the genre which eliminates semantic contradictions. "Words build into their poetic meaning by building into sound . . . sound in composition: music" (R. P. Blackmur). "A poet does not compose *in order to* make of language a delightful and exciting music; he composes a delightful and exciting music in language *in order to* make what he has to say peculiarly efficacious in our minds" (Lascelles Abercrombie). Lyrical poetry is "the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself" (James Joyce). "Hence in lyrical poetry what is conveyed is not mere emotion, but the imaginative prehension of emotional states . . ." (Herbert Read). It is "an internal mimesis of sound and imagery" (Northrop Frye). Thus, in contemporary critical usage it may be said that "l." is a general, categorical, and nominal term, whereas in pre-Renaissance sense it was specific, generic, and descriptive. In its modern meaning, a l. is a type of poetry which is mechanically representational of a musical architecture and which is thematically representational of the poet's sensibility as evidenced in a fusion of conception and image. In its older and more confined sense, a l. was simply a poem written to be sung; this meaning is preserved in the modern colloquialism of referring to the words of a song as its "lyrics."
However useful definitions of the l. may be, they cannot indicate the great flexibility of technique and range of subjects which have helped this category to comprise the bulk of poetic literature. There are literally dozens of l. genres, ranging from the ancient *partheneia* to the modern vers libre; and no topic, whether a cicada or a locomotive, has been neglected by the l. poets. Though it is manifestly impossible to say everything about the historical development of the l. in a short summary, certain general facts prove interesting as pieces in an evolving pattern of theories about and treatment of the lyrical mode between various ages, cultures, and individuals. The l. is as old as recorded literature; and its history is that of human experience at its most animated.
It is logical to suppose that the first "lyrical" poems came into being when men [sic] discovered the pleasure that arises from combining words in a coherent, meaningful sequence with the almost physical process of uttering rhythmical and tonal sounds to convey feelings. The instinctive human tendency to croon or hum or intone as an expression of emotional mood is evidenced in the child's babbling; and the socialization of this tendency in primitive cultures by the chanting and singing of nonsense syllables to emphasize tribal rites is a well documented phenomenon. At that remote point in time when the syllables ceased to be nonsense and became syntactically and connotatively meaningful, the first l. was composed but in what Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal cave this took place, no one will ever know, though speculations about the folk origins of literature range from those of Herder to Jung to A. B. Lord. The earliest recorded evidence of l. poetry would indicate that such compositions emerged from ritualistic activity accompanying religious ceremonies and were expressive of the mystical experience which the "poet" or speaker was undergoing. The dividing line between the nonsense babblings of the Pythoness at Delphi and the transliteration by the priests into a coherent unit of thought is indicative of the fashion in which many of the early religious lyrics came into existence. Scholars have found evidence to support this theory of the religious derivation of poetry in general and the l. in particular in such literatures as the Sanskrit, Celtic, and Japanese, as well as the Gr.
[end]
Alec
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