The Aesthetics of Communication

AESTHETICIZING PRAGMATICS The Gamut of Pragmatics Pragmatics emerged among the sciences of language at the end of the 1960's in reaction to certain totalizing models in linguistics: structuralism (primarily in Europe) and generative grammar (initially in the United States). Certain disciples of Chomsky became dissatisfied with autono mous syntax and later with generative semantics: they decided to break away from their mentor. Whereas Chomsky continued to talk a lot about very little, they defied him by speaking very suggestively about an exces sively broad range of phenomena. Pragmatics -which Bar-Hillel consid ered as a 'wastebasket discipline' in the fifties - nevertheless gained respectability. The history of pragmatics spans, of course, much more than three decades. The Stoic conception of language, in the shadow of the great Greek tradition and therefore intensely subversive, had in fact a pragmatic aim. The term pragmatisch appears in Kant: it expresses a relation with a human goal, this goal being only determinable within a community. This characterization naturally inspires the pragmaticism of l the Neo-Kantian Charles Sanders Peirce . It is this Kant-Peirce lineage that led to Morris and Carnap's rather bland conceptions of pragmatics, after the heavy losses incurred by positivism and behaviorism. In any case, despite the constant presence of a pragmatic approach in the history of thought, this reassessment of pragmatics (against the triumphs proclaimed by structuralism and generativism) was experienced as a Significant break through. A whole range of pragmatics came to the attention of linguists.

Aestheticizing Pragmatics. - The Gamut of Pragmatics. - Homo Economicus and Homo Sociologicus. - Antilope, Albertine and Penelope: Three Little Ontologies. - Modus Logicus and Modus Aestheticus. - 1 Strategic Rationality. - 1. Philia and Ens. - 2. Calculus and Manipulation. - 3. The Art of War or Kriegskunst. - 4. Games of Society and Games of Culture. - 2 Time, That Great Sculptor. - 1. Saying Time. - 2. Sensing Time. - 3. Remembering Time. - 4. Epilogue: Suffering Time. - 3 Abductive Understanding. - 1. Intuition. - 2. Presumption. - 3. Habit. - 4. Sensibility. - 4 Reasonable Pathos. - Prolegomena: The Discursive Economy of Pathos. - 2. The Logic of Sentiments. - 3. The Reasons of Passion. - 4. The Reasons for Desiring Passion. - 5 The Sublime and the Ambiance of Seduction. - 1. Hypostasis and Critique of the Sublime. - 2. The Schema of Aesthetic Values. - 3. The (Sublime) Ambiance of Seduction. - 6 The Attitude of Good Taste. - 1. Understanding the Acceptable. - 2. Desiring the Obligatory. - 3. The Royal Way. - 7 Communicating Through Aisthesis. - 1. The Pursuit and Crisis of Foundations. - 2. The Argumentative and Communicative Community. - 3. The Affective Community. - 4. Socializing the Sensible, Sensibilizing the Social.