In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

W e can now say that the meaningfulness of discursive speech, of whatever is in the course of being uttered, is a feature of the general will. As far as “communication” is the issue, the general will is meaningfulness per se, which is the becoming that is waited on in every instance of uttering or gesturing. In this way, instances transpire in the attitude of waiting implicit in the sociality of life. Meaningfulness, in the moment of the general will that belongs to language, lies in the continuation of speaking— in the limitless circulation of a value for which there is no substitute and no standard of redemption—beyond whatever fleetingly appears as the vehicle of a particular meaning. As Rousseau showed, this is its strength and its vulnerability . The meaningfulness of an utterance does not lie in its intended use but on its discursive character. Something is a meaningful utterance insofar as it projects more opportunities for continuation than it can possibly command. In that sense, it anticipates and does not constitute agency and intentionality. The very being of “others in general,” crucial to the idea of society, is constituted, brought to life, in the attitude of waiting that marks utterances as discursively meaningful and therefore as moments in the un-owned course of the activity of speaking. An utterance that exemplifies discursive speech is, first of all, a venture in the continuation of a course of activity. It is, in this respect, consistent with how I interpret Rousseau’s first convention, momentarily indifferent to particular, nameable others. If alienation has anything to do with this, it is not because of an opposition between individual and group. The meaning and significance of such an utterance cannot be theorized as an individual speaker’s desire or accomplishment; and it cannot be understood as an instance of meaningful 24 Collective Enunciation 400 Chapter 24 communication on the model of speaking and hearing as separable processes involving different but connected sorts of agency, as in Paul Grice’s (1989) account of “conversation” in his discussion of “conversational implicature.” Nor, in most cases, could it be such an accomplishment or an instance of such communication . This is because, as a moment of discursive speech, uttering is neither originary nor complete. It is not an act or a result of a decision. It is always passing through the hearing and speaking of “someones,” which is how its meaningfulness is realized as an ongoing accomplishment. It is, then, not an action or the result of a “decision.” Nor, it must be added, is it an instance of alienation, just the opposite. For Russell (1974), “vagueness and imprecision” were defects of speech understood ideally as a series of monologues and turns and, correspondingly, on an implicit model of communication as an exchange of distinct messages aimed at a possible meeting of minds predicated on a prior meeting of minds (agreement about certain aspects of meaning that have to do with particular intentions). Such a model does not describe discourse, which is an irreducible course of activity that never succeeds in totalizing itself. Any attempt to individuate the utterance by “correcting” its discursive character (or modeling it accordingly) effectively negates its intelligibility: as if discursivity itself (sociality ) undermines the activity of speaking. The immanent sociality of speaking makes something like communication inevitable. It depends on the irreducibility of discourse to particular durable forms and particular intentions. As we have seen, the temptation to reduce in either respect serves interests inhospitable to the sociality of which intentions and forms are merely moments. Thus, the idea of the social as a course of activity is necessary to the intelligibility of the idea of discursive speech. This is in contrast with speech conceived of according to a logic of discrete and reproducible acts that realize intended meaning by virtue of the formal ordering of contents based on consensus about the limitations of their meaning, and based on a consensus that consensus itself provide such a standard—that the burden of proof is always on the statistically deviant. If speech is taken to be material in the sense of distinct and discrete actions capable of being extracted from their situation for interpretation or explanation, then the selection of that material must be interpreted and explained for its appropriateness to the choice of methods for analyzing it. This means that the linguistic material must already be both meaningful and intelligible.1 An analysis of meaning that depends on an unstated theory of...

Share