When Words Lose Their Meaning
posted by Frank Pasquale
I’ve recently been reading James Boyd White’s wise book When Words Lose Their Meaning. His take on Thucydides is particularly relevant to our predicament. Given that it’s graduation speech season, I thought the following lines might be of particular interest:
Imagine you are invited to give a speech in appreciation of a public or private figure you actually admire. How can you do it without sounding like an idiot? (”Unparalleled devotion to public service”; “wonderful family man, loyal friend”; “great personal sacrifice”; “exemplar of American ideals”, etc., etc.). It is not an adequate response to say that one will simply state in plain terms what one means, as if language were a simple intellectual instrument for naming qualities and expressing judgments. (118)
Rather, White argues, “It is the task of the writer on such an occasion to remake his language so that it and his judgments are sound and fresh. . . . ”
But what if this seems impossible? Steven Millhauser has a fascinating short story in the New Yorker about a PR man who loses all faith in the ability of words to communicate. He once celebrated business for “the precision of its vocabulary—a self-enclosed world of carefully defined words that permitted clarity of thought.” But doubt sets in:
I was still able to do some work, during the day, a little work, though I was also staring a lot at the screen. I had command of a precise and specialized vocabulary that I could summon more or less at will. But the doubt had arisen, corroding my belief. Groups of words began to disintegrate under my intense gaze. I was like a man losing his faith, with no priest to turn to.
White’s solution to such a dilemma is to call for the use of language that is “literary–merging fact, value, and reason, fusing the particular and the general, uniting thought and emotion, logic and image–rather than theoretical or conceptual” (229). He insists that “the law is less a branch of the social sciences than of the humanities in that it seeks not to be a closed system but an open one” (273). That may well be an overreaction to the types of Law & Econ and CLS dominant at the time he wrote the book (1984). But it is a good guiding sentiment for how we allow the specialized vocabularies of other fields of knowledge to inform our work. . . . and how much confidence we should have in the degree of fit between our own conceptual apparatus and a messy world.
May 11, 2007 at 7:32 am
Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Culture, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Law School, Law and Humanities, Philosophy of Social Science
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Responses (3)
Belle Lettre - May 11, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Frank, thanks for a very interesting post. I’ve been thinking about this issue off and on for the past few years, both as a former literary crit concentrating English major and as a lapsed CRT law student.
White’s project for language is more constructive than that of Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, or even Stanley Fish (whose interpretive community argument is similar to White’s textual community). But it’s striking to me your note about when the book was written and its historical context.
Compare it to now, with the rise of ELS and the comparative stagnation of other critical theories. Even CRT now is more heavily influenced by the social sciences (social network theory, behavioral psychology, implicit cognition) than the humanities. Whither textual deconstruction or “storytelling”?
What’s interesting is that White was making an argument for a “literary” use of language as applied to the law, which would imply the support of constructive narrativity. Ironic when you think that at the same time the dominant project in the literature departments was to trash text, just as CLS trashed legal rules. Still, if law is more like the humanities than the social sciences, then it could do worse than to pick a discipline that (whether decontructionist or constructivist) was always concerned with the interpretation of language rather than metrics.
I say all of this, but for my SJD I’m going to do an organizational theory and an empirical project on the FMLA. Such is the current trend in my department.
Daniel Goldberg - May 11, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Great post. Though I am not familiar with White’s work, what he (and you) seem to be speaking of is highly relevant to the study of rhetoric, which for painful generations in the 20th century was virtually ignored by all but a few specialists. Fortunately, rhetoric has enjoyed something of a “comeback” during the last 15-20 years, along with the aretaic turn, and with good reason.
Of course, the interest in the two is not coincidental, as rhetoric was prized by the humanists primarily because it was rhetoric which could move people’s hearts to virtuous practice (or so though both classical rhetors like Cicero and Quintillian and medieval scholars like Petrarch and Erasmus).
Central to rhetoric, of course, is the notion of decorum, or tailoring one’s voice to suit the particular audience and the speaker/writer’s objectives. Though this seems almost self-evident, I daresay that finding a fit between a particular language and a given inquiry/audience is both more important and more difficult than is often thought, and these difficulties are only exacerbated by the “siloism” of the Academy.
Scott Greenfield - May 12, 2007 at 6:38 am
Thanks for raising interesting and important ideas. While academia may appreciate the nuance, lawyers in the trenches tend to forget (if they ever knew) the significance of meaning and rhetoric in communication. And, of course, communication is the most basic skill of a trial lawyer.
While I cannot appreciate the depth of discussion any more than the average lawyer, I very much appreciate your raising the subject at all and giving us a reason to think about it. It’s not much, but it’s a start. In my simplistic way, I’ve tried to pass this along to the folks in the trenches.
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