Sapir sur la voie d'une anthropologie de l'«énonciation»
Essai de synthèse sur Edward Sapir et nous

 

La pensée de Edward Sapir (1884-1939) est passée par deux tournants successifs: le tournant de 1916 à partir duquel il s'intéresse à la psychanalyse, et le tournant de 1927 à partir duquel émerge le thème de la psychiatrie et de l'approche «clinique» de la culture. Se reporter pour plus de précision dans cette biographie intellectuelle à Regna Darnell, “Personality and culture. The fate of the Sapirian alternative,” in George W. Stocking Jr, ed., Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others, Madison, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1986, pp. 156-183. De 1910 à 1925, Sapir travaille au musée d'Ottawa. C'est pendant cette période qu'il s'initie à la «psychologie dynamique», sans s'attacher à un modèle particulier de l'inconscient. Il se sent plus proche de Jung que de Freud, parce que la caractérologie de Jung le conduit à mettre l'accent sur les variations individuelles au sein d'une culture donnée. Mais c'est en 1925, quand il devient professeur à l'Université de Chicago, qu'il entre en contact avec la psychiatrie, à travers les liens d'amitié qu'il noue avec le psychiatre Harry Stack Sullivan. En 1925 Sapir intervient dans une Conférence sur le thème “Speech as a personality trait” (publié en 1927). Darnell est excellente sur ce point d'histoire. C'est de la rencontre entre Sapir et Sullivan que date le rapprochement entre psychiatrie et sciences sociales aux Etats-Unis dans les années 1927-1929, et l'essor des recherches sur la personnalité. Deux universités vont être au cœur de ce rapprochement: d'un côté Chicago (Sapir et «l'école de Chicago» en sociologie à laquelle il est lié, spécialement Ernest Burgess et W.I. Thomas), et de l'autre Yale où l'Institut de Psychologie financé par la Fondation Rockfeller est en train de se transformer pour devenir bientôt le fameux Institute of Human Relations. Sapir passe de Chicago à Yale en 1931 et y crée un séminaire Culture et personnalité.

Les textes de Sapir sont d'une banalité trompeuse à première lecture; un peu d'érudition est nécessaire pour les contextualiser, lire entre les lignes et reconnaître chez Sapir l'influence de la pensée allemande, la position paradigmatique qu'il accorde à la philologie et à la poétique, etc. Noter l'attitude de Sapir ethnologue, qui préfigure ce qu'on appelle dans le jargon d'aujourd'hui «l'individualisme méthodologique».

Baudelot = Edward Sapir, Anthropologie, traduit de l'américain par Christian Baudelot et Pierre Clinquart, Paris, éd. de Minuit, 1967; rééd. Paris, Seuil, collection Points, 1971.

Boltanski = Edward Sapir, Linguistique, traduction de Jean-Elie Boltanski et Nicole Soulé-Susbielles, Paris, éd. de Minuit, 1968; rééd. Paris, Gallimard, collection Folio, 1991.

Mandelbaum = Edward Sapir, Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality, Edited by David G. Mandelbaum, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1949; paperback ed., 1985.

 

1 / Les formes linguistiques en tant que produits esthétiques

En distinguant les formes linguistiques directes et indirectes, Sapir préfigure la distinction introduite un demi-siècle plus tard entre la fonction référentielle et la fonction indexicale du langage.

The unconscious patterning of behavior in society (1927). Mandelbaum, 549-550 (Baudelot, 40)

Language has the somewhat exceptionnal property that its forms are, for the most part, indirect rather than direct in their functional significance. The sounds, words, grammatical forms, syntactic constructions, and other linguistic forms that we assimilate in childhood have only value in so far as society has tacitly agreed to see them as symbols of reference. For this reason language is an unusually favorable domain for the study of the general tendency of cultural behavior to work out all sorts of formal elaborations that have only a secondary, and, as it were, “after the event” relevance to functional needs. Purely functional explanations of language, if valid, would lead us to expect either a far greater uniformity in linguistic expression than we actually find, or should lead us to discover strict relations of a functional nature between a particular form of language and the culture of the people using it. Neither of these expectations is fulfilled by the facts. Whatever may be true of other types of cultural behavior, we can safely say that the forms of speech developed in the different parts of the world are at once free and necessary, in the sense in which all artistic productions are free and necessary. Linguistic forms as we find them bear only the loosest relation to the cultural needs of a given society, but they have the very tightest consistency as aesthetic products.

La même polarité entre référence (symbols of reference) et énonciation (aesthetic products) peut être formulée à la manière de Peirce en distinguant deux types de symbolisme dont l'un est directement référentiel tandis que l'autre, investi d'émotion, est ce que l'on appellera un demi-siècle plus tard l'iconicité.

Symbolism (1934). Mandelbaum, 565-566 (Baudelot, 50-52)

It seems useful to distinguish two main types of symbolism. The first of these, which may be called referential symbolism, embraces such forms as oral speech, writing, the telegraph code, national flags, flag signaling and other organizations of symbols which are agreed upon as economical devices for purposes of reference. The second type of symbolism is equally economical and may be termed condensation symbolism, for it is a highly condensed form of substitutive behavior for direct expression, allowing for the ready release of emotional tension in conscious or unconscious form. Telegraphic ticking is virtually a pure example of referential symbolism; the apparently meaningless washing ritual of an obsessive neurotic, as interpreted by the psychoanalysts, would be a pure example of condensation symbolism. In actual behavior both types are generally blended. Thus specific forms of writing, conventionalized spelling, peculiar pronunciations and verbal slogans, while ostensibly referential, easily take on the character of emotionalized rituals and become highly important to both individual and society as substitutive forms of emotional expression. Were writing merely referential symbolism, spelling reforms would not be so difficult to bring about.

Une thèse capitale, que Sapir partage avec Lucien Lévy-Bruhl et qui leur vient de la psychologie de la fin du XIXe siècle, je veux dire de Théodule Ribot pour Lévy-Bruhl et de la psychanalyse pour Sapir, préfigure l'hypothèse de Sapir-Whorf; c'est la thèse selon laquelle l'émotion est l'amorce de la conceptualisation.

Symbols of the referential type undoubtedly developed later as a class than condensation symbols. It is likely that most referential symbolisms go back to unconsciously evolved symbolisms saturated with emotional quality, which gradually took on a purely referential character as the linked emotion dropped out of the behavior in question.

 

2 / Les trois phases dans l'œuvre de Sapir

Je distinguerai trois phases dans le développement de la pensée anthropologique d'Edward Sapir: — le disciple de Boas jusqu'en 1916 (l'ethnologie comme inventaire des traits spécifiques d'une culture); — un tournant en 1916 à partir duquel il s'intéresse à l'analyse de la subjectivité, de la création individuelle et de l'inconscient collectif (naissance de l'école Culture et personnalité); — un autre tournant en 1927 à partir duquel émerge le thème du «psychiatre dont a besoin l'anthropologie» (naissance d'une anthropologie «clinique»). Le contraste est frappant, par exemple, entre un article de 1924 sur l'authenticité des cultures, et les articles de 1927 puis 1932-1934 sur le langage et l'inconscient, l'ethnologie et la psychiatrie.

Edward Sapir, Culture, Genuine and Spurious (1924); Mandelbaum, 308-331

(308) The word “culture” seems to be used in three main senses or groups of senses.

[1. la civilisation, ensemble de croyances, connaissances et comportements traditionnels]
First of all, culture is technically used by the ethnologist and culture-historian to embody any socially inherited element in the life of man, material and spiritual. Culture so defined is coterminous with man himself, for even the lowliest savages live in a social world characterized by a complex network of traditionally conserved habits, usages, and attitudes [...] each being retained for a given time not as the direct and automatic resultant of purely hereditary qualities but by means of the more or less consciously imitative processes summarized by the terms “tradition” and “social inheritance.” [...]

[2. une «personne cultivée»]
The second application of the term [...] refers to a rather conventional ideal of individual refinement, built up on a certain modicum of assimilated knowledge and experience but made up chiefly of a set of typical reactions that have the sanction of a class and of a tradition of long standing. Sophistication in the realm of intellectual goods is demanded of the applicant to the title of “cultured person,” but only up to a certain point. Far more emphasis is placed upon manner, a certain preciousness of conduct which takes different colors according to the nature of the personality that has assimilated the “cultured” ideal. [...] Aloofness [le quant à soi, une attitude distante ou réservée] of some kind is generally a sine qua non of the second type of culture. Another of its indispensable requisites is intimate contact with the past. [...]

[3. l'«esprit» ou le «génie» d'un peuple]
The cultural conception we are now trying to grasp aims to embrace in a single term those general attitudes, views of life, and specific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its distinctive place in the world. Emphasis is put not so much on what is done and believed by a people as on how what is done and believed functions in the whole life of that people, on what significance it has for them. The very same element of civilization may be a vital strand in the culture of one people, and a well-nigh negligible factor in the culture of another. The present conception of culture is apt to crop up particularly in connection with problems of nationality, with attempts to find embodied in the character and civilization of a given people some peculiar excellence, some distinguishing force, that is strikingly its own. Culture thus becomes nearly synonymous with the “spirit” or “genius” of a people, yet not altogether, for whereas these loosely used terms refer rather to a psychological, or pseudo-psychological, background of national civilization, culture includes with this background a series of concrete manifestations which are believed to be peculiarly symptomatic of it.

Noter l'origine allemande de cette troisième définition de la culture, sur laquelle s'est construite l'école Culture et personnalité. Noter la dialectique entre contenus manifeste (concrete manifestations) et latent (background). La suite du texte confirme l'adhésion de Sapir au spiritualisme de cette conception allemande de la culture, quand par exemple il développe le thème de l'authenticité: the relative genuineness of the culture which forms its spiritual essence. Cependant, il s'en démarque déjà par l'intérêt qu'il porte à l'affectivité individuelle.

(316) The major activities of the individual must directly satisfy his own creative and emotional impulses, must always be something more than means to an end. The great cultural fallacy of industrialism, as developed up to the present time, is that in harnessing machines to our uses it has not known how to avoid the harnessing of the majority of mankind to its machines. The telephone girl who lends her capacities, during the greater part of the living day, to the manipulation of a technical routine that has eventually high efficiency value but that answers to no spiritual needs of her own is an appalling sacrifice to civilization. As a solution of the problem of culture she is a failure—the more dismal the greater her natural endowment. [...] A culture that does not build itself out of the central interests and desires of its bearers, that works from general ends to the individual, is an external culture. The word “external,” which is so often instinctively chosen to describe such a culture, is well chosen. The genuine culture is internal, it works from the individual to ends.

Dans les textes qui, à partir de 1927, préfigurent la constitution d'une nouvelle méthode «clinique» (si l'on me permet ce premier anachronisme) en anthropologie, je distinguerai deux principes: l'individualisme méthodologique, et une anthropologie de l'énonciation (je me rends coupable ici de deux anachronismes supplémentaires). Sur l'individualisme méthodologique:

Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry (1932); Mandelbaum, 515

The so-called culture of a group of human beings, as it is ordinarily treated by the cultural anthropologist, is essentially a systematic list of all the socially inherited patterns of behavior which may be illustrated in the actual behavior of all or most of the individuals of the group. The true locus, however, of these processes which, when abstracted into a totality, constitute culture is not in a theoretical community of human beings known as society, for the term “society” is itself a cultural construct which is employed by individuals who stand in significant relations to each other in order to help them in the interpretation of certain aspects of their behavior. The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions. Every individual is, then, in a very real sense, a representative of at least one sub-culture which may be abstracted from the generalized culture of the group of which he is a member. Frequently, if not typically, he is a representative of more than one sub-culture, and the degree to which the socialized behavior of any given individual can be identified with or abstracted from the typical or generalized culture of a single group varies enormously from person to person.

Quant à ce que nous appelons aujourd'hui une anthropologie de l'énonciation, elle est préfigurée dans les textes où Edward Sapir part de la parole pour analyser la culture, comme dans un article de 1927 (Speech as a Personality Trait) où il analyse successivement les cinq différents «niveaux d'articulation de la parole» (levels of speech):

• la voix proprement dite,
• la dynamique de la voix (l'intonation, le rythme, la continuité de la chaîne parlée),
• la prononciation,
• le vocabulaire,
• et cinquièmement, le style.

A chaque niveau de l'analyse on distingue la mise en œuvre individuelle (l'énonciation) des configurations sociales de la parole. Plus encore:

The social level, moreover, has generally to be divided into two levels, the level of that social pattern which is language [autrement dit, «la langue» dans la mesure où elle est mise en œuvre dans «la parole»] and the level of the linguistically irrelevant habits of speech manipulation [autrement dit, les aspects sociolinguistiques de la parole qui ne relèvent pas de la linguistique formelle mais intéressent l'ethnologue] that are characteristic of a particular group (Mandelbaum, 540).

Ce que nous appelons aujourd'hui «l'énonciation» se situe essentiellement au cinquième niveau d'articulation de la parole: le style, en ce qu'il trahit les enjeux du discours et la position du locuteur.

 

3 / Ethnopoétique et anthropologie de l'énonciation

La culture fournit aux individus le donné traditionnel — linguistique, esthétique, social — avec lequel ils construisent leur vie, et les individus, personnalités créatives, plient ce donné culturel à leur propre usage, reformulant par le même mouvement la culture. Sapir souligne toujours l'unicité de l'individu aux dépens de la culture. Un thème comme celui de «la valeur heuristique de la rime» (The Heuristic Value of Rhyme) — titre d'un article de 1920 (Mandelbaum, 496–499) — traduit la même dialectique entre forme et inspiration. Les contraintes formelles de la poésie comme genre littéraire — la rime et la prosodie — nourrissent l'inspiration individuelle. La création poétique dans la langue maternelle est une illustration privilégiée de la «culture» comme qualité d'une personne cultivée. C'est dans ce contexte qu'il faut interpréter «l'hypothèse de Sapir». Je prends l'hypothèse de Sapir «in one of its strong versions» (Paul Friedrich, Poetic Language and the Imagination. A Reformulation of the Sapir Hypothesis, repris dans Language, Context, and the Imagination, Satanford, 1979, p. 441). La langue poétique organise de façon significative l'imagination individuelle et vient insufler dans la langue ordinaire tout un monde moral. Caractère focalisant du langage poétique. L'hypothèse de Sapir ainsi interprétée est que «le langage des poètes constitue l'une des principales fonctions, dimensions, potentialités de toute langue naturelle; toute langue naturelle est au moins en partie implicitement poétique» (Friedrich, ibidem). Après Sapir, Friedrich propose une extension de l'hypothèse du relativisme linguistique habituellement appliquée aux ethnosciences, et qui s'étend aussi à la poésie: “Poems and poetic language provide the strongest case for linguistic relativity” (Paul Friedrich, The Language Parallax. Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy, Austin, 1986, p. 43).

Dans la conclusion de The Grammarian and His Language (1924), Sapir paraît identifier la linguistique à la poésie, dans la mesure où l'une et l'autre nous dévoilent un univers autonome de formes de pensée qu'occulte d'ordinaire notre adhésion naïve à nos habitudes langagières. Comme les mathématiques ou la musique, elles font émerger dans la langue ordinaire (langue routinière) une langue cultivée (langue créatrice). «Nous pourrions multiplier à l'infini, dit-il, les exemples d'analyses incommensurables entre elles auxquelles les différentes langues soumettent l'expérience (incommensurable analyses of experience in different languages)».

The Grammarian and His Language (1924); Mandelbaum, 159 (Boltanski, 129)

The upshot of it all would be to make very real to us a kind of relativity that is generally hidden from us by our naïve acceptance of fixed habits of speech as guides to an objective understanding of the nature of experience. This is the relativity of concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought. [...] It is the appreciation of the relativity of the form of thought which results from linguistic study that is perhaps the most liberalizing thing about it. What fetters  the mind and benumbs the spirit (ce qui enchaîne la pensée et paralyse l'esprit) is ever the dogged acceptance (l'adhésion obstinée) of absolutes.

To a certain type of mind linguistics has also that profoundly serene and satisfying quality which inheres in mathematics and in music and which may be described as the creation out of simple elements of a self-contained universe of forms. Linguistics has neither the sweep nor the instrumental power of mathematics, nor has it the universal aesthetic appeal of music. But under its crabbed (revêche), technical, appearance there lies hidden the same classical spirit, the same freedom in restraint, which animates mathematics and music at their purest. This spirit is antagonistic to the romanticism which is rampant in America today and which debauches so much of our science with its frenetic desire.

Paul Friedrich a paraphrasé ce texte dans “The culture in poetry and the poetry in culture”, in E. Valentine Daniel & Jeffrey M. Peck, eds., Culture / Contexture. Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1996, pp. 37-57; spéc. p. 42. Les poésies, dit-il, représentent «une morphologie de l'affectivité», en ce que la forme d'une poésie reflète la forme des émotions qu'elle symbolise.

But this morphology of feeling—and this is one peculiarity of poetry among the verbal arts—is also like music in a way that bears not just on the representation of emotion in a given culture or tradition but on the representation of emotion by the student of culture in the larger sense: as suggested earlier, poetry is like music in its powerful rules for economy, condensation, and what Stevens called “the art of finding what will suffice.” Because poetry is understandably grouped with the humanities, and because the criticism of poetry has to be so grouped, most people overlook or at least neglect how close poetry is not only to music but to linguistics and even mathematics (Sapir 1924; Mandelbaum, 159). The quality of elegance and the goal of extracting gist, neither of which can be captured by paraphrase, help to make poems and poetic lines part of the charters and ideologies of many cultures which the student of culture may want to deconstruct or at least examine with due thoughtfulness.

C'est là tracer le programme d'une anthropologie de l'énonciation, et l'ethnopoétique est la voie royale conduisant à cette connaissance de l'expression de soi dans le langage.