How to make our subjects clear: Denotational transparency and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora
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Michael Lempert
Research interests include subject formation in discursive interaction, text-metrical (‘poetic’) performativity, and ideologies of language and the speaking subject in projects of modernity. For
Language & Communication he has coedited a special issue, ‘Temporalities in Text’ (forthcoming), and he is presently completing a book on communicative incivility and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora.
Abstract
To examine the fraught relationship between intelligibility and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora, this article first revisits Malinowski's classic discussion of the so-called ‘co-efficients’ of ‘weirdness and intelligibility’ in magical speech, noting how these qualities of discourse were mediated by a post-Enlightenment language ideology and evolutionist presumptions of alterity. Malinowski's text is instructive in this respect, for concerns with denotational transparency have long been wedded to larger ideological projects, including projects as ambitious as the very re-definition of the speaking subject. This article then turns to efforts by Tibetan Buddhist modernists in India to redefine the subject, specifically in the domain of monastic discipline. The focal practice is ‘public reprimand’ (tshogs gtam), delivered by Disciplinarians at the major Geluk monasteries of southern India. Using transcripts of a reprimand recorded at Sera Mey Monastic College, this article examines how indirection and dissimulation characterize this practice, and it then shows how this and a related form of reprimand begin to trouble Tibetans who engage a modernist language ideology, one premised on clarity, sincerity, and civility—attributes that bear a family resemblance to those of the liberal speaking subject of modernity.
About the author
Research interests include subject formation in discursive interaction, text-metrical (‘poetic’) performativity, and ideologies of language and the speaking subject in projects of modernity. For Language & Communication he has coedited a special issue, ‘Temporalities in Text’ (forthcoming), and he is presently completing a book on communicative incivility and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora.
© Walter de Gruyter
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editorial: The ritual of (not) making sense of unintelligibility
- Introduction: Ritual unintelligibility
- Unintelligibility and imaginative interpretation in a Petalangan healing ritual
- Making sense of unintelligible messages in divine communication
- Unintelligibility as discourse accessibility in a Senegalese ethnomedical encounter
- ‘Unintelligibles’ in vocal performances at Middle Eastern marriage celebrations
- How to make our subjects clear: Denotational transparency and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora
- Words on the lips and meanings in the stomach: Ideologies of unintelligibility and theories of metaphor in Toraja ritual speech
- Comments on ritual unintelligibility
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editorial: The ritual of (not) making sense of unintelligibility
- Introduction: Ritual unintelligibility
- Unintelligibility and imaginative interpretation in a Petalangan healing ritual
- Making sense of unintelligible messages in divine communication
- Unintelligibility as discourse accessibility in a Senegalese ethnomedical encounter
- ‘Unintelligibles’ in vocal performances at Middle Eastern marriage celebrations
- How to make our subjects clear: Denotational transparency and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora
- Words on the lips and meanings in the stomach: Ideologies of unintelligibility and theories of metaphor in Toraja ritual speech
- Comments on ritual unintelligibility
