Ethical Life : Its Natural and Social Histories by Keane Webb

Author:Keane, Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

DISCIPLINING THE CLASH OF VOICES

The clashing voices of Don Gabriel all inhabit a single monologue. We can’t know for sure how consciously artful or not his performance is—it is probably an unstable mix of both. This talk may represent one moment in his emergent ethical self-awareness. But if so, this consciousness seems not to be the result of moral breakdown or moral dumbfounding but, rather, something both more uneven and more ubiquitous in everyday life. Some characterological figures, such as that of the virtuous Mexicano-speaking farmer, are quite stable and easily spotted by speaker and listener alike. Others, such as the voice of judgmental comments on the side, may appear and disappear again, lacking a stable identity attached to a recognizable verbal style.

Were the distinctive voices at play in his talk to become fully identifiable, attaching verbal styles to social stereotypes, they could enter into the public staging of ethical figures. Crystallized as generally known ethical types within a given community, voices could be purposely appropriated for didactic ends. This is exactly what goes on in the moral education of diasporic Tibetan monks analyzed by linguistic anthropologist Michael Lempert (2012). One of the speech genres Lempert discusses is the harangue of the disciplinarian, addressed to the gathered monks. It may be triggered by the lapses of certain individuals, but it is carefully addressed to no one in particular. The “penal semiotics” here, as Lempert puts it, make use of the full range of formal properties of speech, such as grammatical devices, word choice, reported speech, metrical contrasts, repetition, vocal quality, and volume, in order to produce a clash of voices.

The didacticism is not just a matter of stating things; it is also produced through the forms with which the disciplinarian expresses himself. By highlighting ethical distinctions, the clash of voices renders them more salient and sharpens the listeners’ awareness of them:

In reprimand, the disciplinarian seeks to reform the moral dispositions of monks through projecting, juxtaposing, and evaluating morally weighted social voices, like the voice of the “derelict monk” … whose failings are spelled out, sometimes in graphic detail, enough to make the guilty parties squirm; whose subjectivity is exposed to the glare of public scrutiny, but whose voice remains anonymous. No finger-pointing, no proper names. In explaining his art to me, the disciplinarian praised this brand of indirection. The objective is to induce in the wrongdoer’s mind the thought “I am the one” about whom the disciplinarian speaks…. Rather than resort to the blunt instrument of biographic individuation, the disciplinarian populates his discourse with morally weighted voices and invites his audience to consider them and adjudicate between them. Like Hamlet’s staging of the play The Murder of Gonzago, the disciplinarian delivers a stinging morality play that depends on voicing for its effectiveness. (Lempert 2012: 110–11)

The effectiveness lies in part in the manipulation of address in order to construct an ethical figure—the derelict monk—in such a way that anyone at all might identify with it:

This indirection … speaks to all because it is addressed to no one….

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