Playing for Real: Discourse and Authority

JOHN FRASER Playing for Real: Discourse and Authority We live amidst an interminable clatter and jostle of discourse; of endlessly proliferating texts; of seemingly infinite regressions wherein to understand A you must first understand B, and to understand B you must first understand c, etc. And yet we muddle along somehow. Most of what we 'know' is there for us because of what we have read or been told; and we make commitments because of it - buy this stereo system rather than that; sign a petition about nuclear disarmament; vote in such-and-such a way at a meeting; see a movie we wouldn't have seen otherwise (and later recommend it to someone else). I am interested here in the grounding of such commitments: in how we can and do achieve a measure ofstability; in how we have at times what we think is a reasonable trust in the discourse of others; so that when we in our turn seek to influence others we are not being merely random or arbitrary. I am especially concerned with the groundings that are appropriate to a university community. If I were a preacher, my text might be 'The spirit killeth, the letter giveth life.' I Let me begin with some unsatisfactory models of discourse. I shall be speaking impressionistically, but Isuspect that most people conceptualize impressionistically, with the aid of half-formed images derived, ultimately , from literature. At least, I know I do. First of all, there is discourse - serious discourse - as overheard monologues. A message is transmitted and decoded - sometimes a very long one - and (if this is a discussion) a message is sent back and decoded in its turn; and so on. And if a tape-recorder has been running, one can sit down and read the transcript - the 'text' - of what was communicated. Implicit in this model, usually, is the feeling that when the transmitted messages concern the 'real' world, the world in which sentient beings suffer pain, we have what might be called a reservoir/conduit situation. I The truths, the shocking or uplifting truths, about this or that foreign country are there, and when anyone with first-hand experience of those countries speaks, a tap is turned and the truth flows. The realities of Central America, say, flow to us from the investigative journalist, or UNIVERSITI OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME ,6, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1987 DISCOURSE AND AUTHORITY 417 political refugee, or returned academic who tells us what actions we must, as decent members of the academic community, take withrespect to them. Such people have 'authority' - the authority of personal knowledge, the moral authority of right feeling. To question whatthey report and demand feels cheap and nasty. Well, I can understand that attitude; it comes into play for me too when I read or hear something that makes my blood boil. But discourse is of course not a conduit; it is ... discourse - a complex of selection, interpretation, fallible recollection, etc. Which is why we have the clatter and jostle that I referred to - the wildly conflicting arguments about what happened when that Korean airliner was shot down over the Soviet Union, the vertiginous somersaultings about Southeast Asia, the endless revisionism about almost everything. And the attitude that I've described is intrinsically authoritarian. Certain truths are established beyond question, certain people are in possession of them, and there is no point in arguing about them. This view of discourse, and of the truth-bearer, resembles the idea of the creative writer - quintessentially The Poet - as a monologuist with a special kind of knowledge that flows out and fills a variety of vessels (a delicate vase here, a massive tankard there) but is always essentially the same knowledge, whether of the universe or of the movements of his or her own soul. The idea of The Poet is a curious one, of course. People don't say admiringly, 'You're a real Composer,' even though composing music is much more mysterious than writing verse. Nor do they sneer at Arthur Hailey's Airport as not'really' a novel. And, as we have learned to our cost, there are dangers in the idea of special knowledge. If a poet...