The Unspeakable

Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World; In a highly original work, Stephen A. Tyler poses a severe challenge to the epistemological premises that underlie modern anthropology. Combining the contributions of scholars such as Walter Ong, Jacques Derrida, and Charles S. Peirce with his own anthro-linguistic experiences, Tyler offers a postmodern orientation to anthropology which, in the author's words, "seeks to atone for the original sin of language, that separation of speech and world we know as the disjunction of words and things." His work will be of interest not only to anthropologists and rhetoricians, but to scholars throughout the humanities and the social sciences. Tyler evokes the Western tradition of speculative thought as a set of rhetorical means that repeat themselves over and over again in history. He describes the metaleptic process of Western thought and identifies the key metaphors, narratives, and allegories that constitute it and make it possible. He tells how to hegemonic categories of ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics express themselves in the concepts of the self, objects, and language. At the same time, he shows how these recapitulate mythic themes from the Indo-European past- themes that equate cosmic order, social order, and mind- and make an identity between what is known and the structure of knowing. Finally, Tyler reminds readers that what he recounts is a creature of a written discourse reflecting on itself and the means of the book's writing. This textual reflectivity, says Tyler disrupts the lineal, temporal, and casual connection of "preception- representation- expression" that underwrites Western philosophy and science and unties itself in "plain style" and object, and language begun in Greek philosophy and furthered by science and psychoanalysis. At the same time it returns these concepts to the everyday, commonsense environments of oral discourse, and thus recuperates the oral world through writing rather than through the deconstruction of writing.