ElAnt v1n4 - On the Utility of Classical Etymology for Sociology
ON THE UTILITY OF CLASSICAL ETYMOLOGY FOR SOCIOLOGY ( 1 )
Michael Morse, Dept. of Human Studies, Humber College, Etobicoke, Ontario, M9W 5L7, Canada. e-mail: MMORSE@VM1.YorkU.CAThe present paper is an offshoot of work in progress on the relation of music and society and the nature of the tune in jazz as a social process. It intended solely for the purposes of extending conversation between the disciplines. I would greatly appreciate hearing comments from interested readers.
I
What does etymology have to do with sociology? In an age of linguistic and cultural relativism, possibly very little. For the former place of etymology at the high table of science was reserved on the basis of its forensic capacities. Scholars in a wide variety of disciplines would trust the origin of a word to be the judge of its contemporary usage. With the postmodern attack on the concept of origin, however - a shift which has registered even unawares for many - this lordly court of appeal seems obsolete or worse. But there has always been more to etymology than a Tiberian judge, making thumbs up or down on a modern word choice. For one thing, as we should know but sometimes forget, the complex and perpetually fluctuating history of words has always resisted singular interpretation; in this respect, classicists could be seen as intellectual precursors of postmodernism rather than its victims. For another, and far more importantly, the introduction of an intellectually faddish jargon of a few hundred words hardly changes the fact that the roots of our language remain Latin and Greek. The function of etymology may change, but it can only lose its relevance when this fact itself changes - at which point, the focus would change from Latin and Greek to whatever verbal formations bore the newly-minted English language. There is far more to the history of words than the search for origins.
Etymology, in other words, is truly a perpetual science. What it can contribute to any discipline which uses words is the establishment of historical coherences in the use and conception of meaning. As Ferdinand de Saussure put it (Saussure, 1986: 259):
'Etymology is thus first and foremost the explanation of words by means of investigating their connexions with other words. Explaining means relating to terms already known'.
Saussure's emphasis on 'explaining' and 'investigating' - as opposed to 'judging' or 'deciding' - is indicative of the real help which etymology provides. It does not resolve conflicts of meaning through the appeal to an external (and therefore irrelevant) standard, but provides a means to explore word-based problems from within word-born disciplines. For the verbal dimension, like the problems themselves, is already internal to the discipline.
In the case of sociology, the central verbal gathering-point of its concerns as a discipline remains human action. From Marx's last thesis on Feuerbach ( 2 ) through the classicists Durkheim and Weber and up to the present methodologically-diffuse condition, action has been a proprietary, field-defining nest of problems. That is to say that sociology takes as its mandate the ability to analyze and explain action as a phenomenon. But a glance at the meager treatment of music in the history of sociology shows how incomplete this pretension has proved. Although the evidence of music has never been formally excluded from schemes of action, it is rarely included. In effect, the aesthetic perspective that music (and art) represent not just a special or specialized experience, but 'something else' - perhaps higher (e.g. symbolically), but certainly other - than social action has been tacitly accepted by sociology (and the other social sciences). This has meant that the testimony of music has been confined to the odd conceptual barrio of aesthetic meaning, and with it all the specifically musical dimensions of experience. While it might be argued that tradition has hallowed the notion that art and its grammatical materials - bassoon sonorities, gouache, pot lighting, rhyme - are legitimately bracketed in considering the rough-and-tumble of everyday action, the genteel exclusion of music marginalizes as well a crucial dimension of experience which is by no means peculiar to music, namely rhythm .
Perhaps it is merely our habit of speaking in comparative terms that is to blame. We speak of salsa as 'more' rhythmic than vocal blues, or Bartok as 'more' rhythmical than Debussy. Yet these coffee-table generalizations will not really stand scrutiny; rhythm is a general organizing principle of music altogether, and thus per se unquantifiable, not a basis for aesthetic or phenomenological comparison. Is Shakespeare 'more' rhythmic than Jonson or Pound or Ferlinghetti? The question is obviously framed incorrectly. Verse, like music, is intrinsically, unavoidably rhythmic. Individual verses may be more satisfying or rhythmically skillful than others, but this does not justify the mistaken metaphor of implicit quantity. And, in the same basic or primal sense, it is not just music and dance and verse, but all social action which is rhythmical - as is all meaning and significance. Unlike melody and harmony, the other members of the trinity which define musicalities, rhythm is common to all human experience. Given this truth, then to push this concept to one side because of its supposedly overartistic parentage risks not just the miscomprehension of music and musicality, but compromising the key concept of sociology altogether.
But what is at stake in clarifying the concept of rhythm? If there is some gain for the conception of social experience to be had, it has so far remained in abeyance. Presumably, the rhythmic dimension of non-artistic experiences is a dead end. While it is true that a business phone-call, a lawyer's speech, a math equation, and a sexual encounter are all rhythmic experiences, this fact tells us nothing of significance about them. Rhythm is an empty universal, except in the case of art. If sociologists have been, perhaps understandably, reluctant to pursue rhythm, at least some anthropologists have not. Edward G. Hall treats rhythmic differences between, to cite his characteristic examples, the Navajo, the Japanese, and urban North Americans as crucial, and tantamount to cultural difference altogether. The work of kinesiologist Ray Birdwhistell ( 3 ) considers a cigarette- lighting ritual with the lavish analytic detail hitherto reserved for the course of action in a Beethoven Symphony. At the risk of ingratitude and unfairness to these estimable researchers, however, the role of musicality in their work is marginal. The particular symptom of this is that neither of them undertake to define or redefine the concept of rhythm in any radical way. In effect, it remains a loosely metaphorical way to explain the elaborate results of their studies. And, in the absence of such a revision, both are obliged to proceed ad hoc methodologically, sometimes very tangibly so.
We could understand the present situation this way: while some anthropologists have appreciated the universality of rhythm and its implications in a positive way, their work has so far found little resonance in sociology, despite the general brief to study action to which this latter field responds. Among the rational reasons for this state of affairs are the suspiciously aesthetical flavour of 'rhythm', the plausible doubt of its utility, based on empty universality, and the general lack of precision in its available usage and meaning.
II
Given this diagnosis, the possible contributions of etymology seem obvious enough, at least to an audience of classicists. But the authority of etymology is anything but assured in such cases. In part this is a function of a truly cataclysmic shift in the intellectual culture of the West. The classical languages, nearly universal in the training of humanists and social scientists a scant thirty years ago, have all but disappeared in a generation. They have worse than disappeared, they have been shunted aside to specialists, whose voices will not be required listening for specialists in other areas. At the same time that younger scholars have become 'interdisciplinary' to an apparently unprecedented degree, the common vocabulary which could enrich and even enable communication among eclectically-varied scholars has been lost. This gloomy prognosis is not, in my view, external to the present problem. As Saussure reminds us, the quintessence of etymology is historical connection, historical situatedness, an almost existential attention to the reality of mutual relations between the words to which look to solve our intellectual and spiritual problems. Skepticism and ignorance in these areas are anything but neutral or irrelevant. And isn't such skepticism, frankly, justified? Given the contradictory profusion of meanings of ruthmos, ( 4 ) is there really much lost if the etymology is ignored? Contemporary students of a certain bent may find word roots interesting, but they can hardly be expected to resolve immediate dilemmas. This view, however, throws out the baby with the bathwater. Abandoning the image of etymology as an all- powerful court of appeals does not mean that the history of a term has nothing to contribute to its clarification is a present-day, even future concept.
I have tried to indicate in broad strokes the neglected and undervalued state of the concept of rhythm in modern sociological thought. But that state is very much a particularity of the modern understanding of the term 'rhythm'. At other moments in its history its progenitors and relatives served other connections, connections which did not presuppose the alienation of art and experience. The history of the term presents us with a vision of a linguistic past which contains both a substantial cultural connection to our own experience through the continued use of a cognate term, and as well some insights into presently neglected conceptions. Readers of this journal will recognize this notion as a kind of offshoot of Heidegger, who based much of his philosophy on the Romantic notion of recovering lost meaning from the Greeks. But Heidegger played fast and loose with the etymological probabilities, and seemed to demand near-mystical results from words such as logos, phusis, and hupokeimenon. It would seem less likely for a sociologist to fall into these traps, for the simple reason that the stress in this discipline is supposed to be entirely on the social. This means that any doctrine of meaning in sociology is, in ideal terms, directly a function of the community in question. The difference has real import for a concept of practice. In effect, sociology proposes a different kind of connection than Heidegger, less like that of an imaginative storyteller, and in ideal sense, less mediated by personal imagination, and more connected to generally social solutions, or to conceptual problems of a community. Thus Saussure's vision of the history of words as a moment in the process of connecting the experiences of (linguistically distinct) groups is eminently sociological in tenor.
For the sociologist puzzled by the problems of action, then, to look the etymology of rhythm means comparing Greek conceptions of action with our own. Action as a problem has the peculiarity of more or less inherent pluralism, a certain resistance to static conceptualization. Unlike objects, for example, actions can be difficult to classify satisfactorily. This not to say that schemes cannot be imposed readily enough - but the thumb on the scale tends to show. Sociological theorists have often tended to take the adjective as a model rather than the noun, as in Durkheim's distinction of mechanical and organic solidarity. Even more, the verb becomes exemplary, directly or thinly disguised as a gerund; classic instances include Max Weber's concept of rationalization and Marx's notion of class struggle. The irony is that 'rhythm', in its host of modern usages, is already an 'active' noun, quite similar to many key terms in sociology in this respect - but, as we have seen, the surrounding context of music ostensibly creates a terminological network which alienates rhythm from a place in the family of social terms of action.
The term 'ruthmos' has much to teach us in these respects. The etymology of ruthmos itself has been controversial, but may have come from 'rein', 'to flow'; it is also possible that the inclination to accept this derivation may itself have been a function of the active proclivities of the term 'ruthmos', especially as read backwards from 'rhythm'. (Proceeding backwards has its dangers - as the last twelve years of American economic policy attest.) Whether this etymology is correct (as hardly seems likely now) or read into the word by philologists after the fact, the reality of ruthmos/rhythm as an active term is little affected. If the derivation was overhasty, it was because students of the term were trying to account for its active quality by projecting a suitable derivation. If this derivation was in fact correct, then the matter is clinched. For present-day (sociological) purposes, however, the result of the dispute is largely immaterial. In either cases, the active dimension of the term as it was actually used is equally clear. ( 5 )
When it was part of a living language, ruthmos belonged to a family of concepts which did not categorize the world statically, but formulated experience dynamically. Even in the specifically art-related usages of the time of Plato and Aristotle and afterwards, this remains true. Ruthmos was a moment of consideration in mousike, to be sure - but mousike itself was a different conception than our 'music', and not just because it involved physical movement. The integration of the moments in mousike did not create a (hitherto non-existent) dynamic whole so much as presuppose a dynamic view of reality. Ruthmos and harmonia were not components of composed things, or analytic properties of objects called music pieces; Plato himself objected to this view, even as his way of looking at the world seemed to hasten its development ( Republic 398c-d). This is the real reason that the derivation is not a decisive factor in making contemporary conceptual choices. It is not the imaginary (or even real) single track of a term's history which has the greatest impact, but its membership in a linguistic ensemble through interaction with other terms. Crudely, concepts interact to produce conceptions, and it is here that fresh reality for us may be sought. And here again, the reality of usage, rather than our poeticizing tendencies imposed upon it, is what matters most, in so far as this is available to us. ( 6 )
The idea of treating real usage as opposed to poetic projection seems naive from the perspective of conflicting usage as well. Where both the classical sources and the contemporary scholars disagree, where is there anything as analgesic as a real conception to be found? The sociological perspective itself ( 7 ) suggests a way to cut down the distance to an entire conception. Sociology, in its classic period, tended to stress the nature of the problem which social action attempts to solve. This level of abstraction includes symbolic gestures such as language, and the conflicting senses of ruthmos ( 8 ) suddenly resolve when viewed in this way. As we have seen, the modern study of action has had some difficulty living up to its mandate to create a unified field theory of action; ( 9 ) the cue from its own perspective, directed toward the sense of ruthmos, is formidable. For the earlier senses of ruthmos did not allow for the projection of our only marginally conscious aesthetic categories, since the term was a moment in the solution of different problems altogether.
Different, that is, by contemporary standards. Aristotle ( Metaphysics 985b) cites Leucippus (and Democritus) claiming that 'ruthmos' is one of the three fundamental differences in substance, namely a difference in 'skhema'. This passage eventually leads Benveniste to conclude that ruthmos, in this earlier usage at least, belongs together with terms such as 'morphe' and 'eidos' (1971: 283ff.). He even goes so far as to say that ruthmos, in such cases, does not mean rhythm. While the prophylactic gesture is prudent and comprehensible under the circumstances, another path suggests itself. Instead of accepting the modern-day split of aesthetic and physical senses of rhythm, the history of ruthmos holds out a way to teach us to understand them integrally once again. The notion of 'skhema' considered by Aristotle is not a classification of shape, but the becoming or self-production of a reality. Such a conception of form necessarily overturns the static-dynamic split between (e.g.) text and performance, demanding that we see the matter differently. It is precisely such artificial ( 10 ) distinctions which have hampered the approach to action as a phenomenon, especially (but not solely) with respect to music, art, and symbolic systems generally.
In this sense, the relevance of ruthmos for social inquiry has not dissipated but, if anything, augmented. The didactic, dynamic possibilities of a term depend upon the possibilities it opens (and re-opens), not the state of affairs it apodictically labels. Unlike modern 'rhythm', which is tied primarily to harmony, melody, and other items in the discourse of musicalities, and only secondarily to movement, barely at all to anything else, 'ruthmos' was part of an ontologically broader and richer family, not subject to the unconscious restrictions of contemporary aesthetics, which - ironically - both deny the functionality of art (and its terminology) on the one hand, but, in the very act of restricting art terms and experiences to the world of art, thereby narrow the focus and impact of both. In this view, art may be more exalted than life - but it is also smaller. Understanding the nature of social action can only mean moving towards the larger, more inclusively human picture, with the aid of every relevant conception.
FOOT NOTES
(2) 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is to change it'.
(4) With pained misgivings, I offer Greek terms in the closest approximation which ASCII allows.
(7) To use the crude singular of an obviously plural phenomenon.
(8) Which will not be elaborated here; cf. Seidel, 1980, for one kind of overview.
The Literature of Rhythm - Some Readings
Introduction:
In place of any substantial conclusion, I have included a kind of bibliographic sample of the discussions of rhythm, grouped under the headings 'Language and Prosody' (speech rhythm), 'Physical Action', 'Philology' (classical sources and critics thereof), and 'Music' (some of the more serious and thoughtful perusals). This is no more than a sample, however, to stimulate further reading and discussion. Sociological discussions are perhaps conspicuous by their absence; social treatments have thus far been the work of anthropologists and linguists.
LANGUAGE and PROSODY
Allen, W. Sidney. (1973). Accent and Rhythm. Cambridge.
Cambridge Georgiades, Thrasybulos. (1959). 'Sprache als Rhythmus', in: Die Sprache. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Schonen Kunste, pp. 109ff.
Jakobson, Roman. (1979). 'On the Translation of Verse', in: Selected Writings II: On Verse, Its Masters and Explorers. The Hague Paris New York: Mouton Publishers, pp. 131-134.
Kiparsky, Paul and Gilbert Youmans, ed. (1989). Phonetics and Phonology. Volume 1: Rhythm and Meter. Phonetics and Phonology Series. Edited by Stephen R. Anderson & Patricia A. Keating. San Diego: Academic Press, Inc./Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1986) Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. Chicago: Open Court Press. (note: the page citation here is to the original French edition, the pagination of which appears in the margins of Harris' translation.)
Sumera, Magdalena. (1981). 'The Keen Prosodic Ear: a comparison of the notations of rhythm of Joshua Steele, William Thomson and Morris Croll', in: Towards a History of Phonetics. Papers Contributed in Honour of David Abercrombie. Edited by R.E. Asher and Eugenie J.A. Henderson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 100-115.PHYSICAL ACTION
Birdwhistell, Ray L. (1970). Kinesics and Context. Essays on Body Motion Communication. Edited by Barton Jones. University of Pennsylvania Publications in Conduct and Communication. Edited by Erving Goffman and Dell Hymes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bucher, Karl. (1896). Arbeit und Rhythmus. Second ed. Leipzig: B. Teubner.
Carpenter, Edmund and Marshall McLuhan. (1960). 'Acoustic Space', in: Exploration in Communication. An Anthology. Edited by Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. Beacon Series in Contemporary Communications. Edited by David Manning White. Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 65-70.
Davis, Martha, ed. (1982). Interaction Rhythms. Periodicity in Communicative Behavior. New York: Human Sciences Press.
Hall, Edward T. (1984). The Dance of Life. The Other Dimension of Time. Anchor Press ed. New York: Doubleday.
Hornbostel, Erich M. von. (1927). 'The Unity of the Senses'. Psyche, VII: 83-89.
Hornbostel, Erich Moritz von. (1986). 'Melodischer Tanz. Eine musikpsychologische Studie', in: Tonart und Ethos. Aufsaetze zur Musikethnologie und Musikpsychologie. Edited by Christian Kaden and Erich Stockmann. Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., pp. 76-86.
Huizinga, Johann. (1956). Homo Ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel. Translated by H. Nachod. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH.
Klages, Ludwig. (1934). Vom Wesen des Rhythmus. Kampen auf Sylt.
Meumann, E. (1893). 'Beitraege zur Psychologie des Zeitsinns'. Philosophische Studien, ix: 264-306.
Meumann, E. (1894). 'Untersuchungen zur Psychologie und Aesthetik des Rhythmus', Philosophische Studien, x: 249-322, 393-430.
Spector, Irwin. (1990). Rhythm and Life. The Work of Emile Jaques- Dalcroze. Dance and Music Series No. 3. Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press.
PHILOLOGY
Aristoxenus, Elementa Rhythmica. Edited by Lionel Pearson, in: Elementa Rhythmica. The Fragment of Book II and the Additional Evidence for Aristoxenean Rhythmic Theory. Translated by Lionel Pearson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990
Barker, Andrew, ed. (1984). Greek Musical Writings, Volume I: The Musician and His Art. Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Music. Edited by John Stevens & Peter LeHuray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barker, Andrew, ed. (1989). Greek Musical Writings, Volume II: Harmonic and Acoustic Theory. Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Music. Edited by John Stevens and Peter LeHuray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benveniste, Emile. (1971). 'The Notion of 'Rhythm' in its Linguistic Expression', in: Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, pp. 281-289.
Heidegger, Martin. (1967). 'Vom Wesen und Begriff der phusis. Aristoteles' Physik B, 1', in: Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, pp. 309-73.
Jaeger, Werner. (1936). Paideia. Die Formung des griechischen Menschen, erster Band. Second ed. Berlin and Leipzig: Walter De Gruyter & Co.
Leemans, E.A. (1948). 'Rythme en ruthmos'. L'Antiquite Classique, 17: 403-12.
Petersen, E. (1917). 'Rhythmus', in: Abhandlungen der koniglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen: philogisch-historische Klasse. Vol. xvi/5, Berlin: 1-104.
Seidel, Wilhelm. (1980). 'Rhythmus/Numerus', in: Handwoerterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie. Edited by Hans-Heinrich Eggebrecht. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1972- , pp. 1- 36.MUSIC
Cooper, Grosvenor and Leonard B. Meyer. (1960). The Rhythmic Structure of Music. Phoenix Books ed. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Dahlhaus, Carl. (1961). 'Zur Entstehung des modernen Taktsystems im 17. Jahrhundert'. Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft, xviii: 223ff.
Dahlhaus, Carl. (1975). ''Rhythmus im Groaen''. Melos/Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik, 6: 439-441. Durr, Walther and Walter Gerstenberg. (1949ff.). 'Rhythmus, Metrum, Takt', in: Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopaedie der Musik unter Mitarbeit zahlreicher Musikforscher des In- und Auslandes. Vol. xi, Edited by Friedrich Blume. Kassel: Barenreiter-Verlag, pp. 383-419.
Durr, Walther, Walter Gerstenberg and Jonathan Harvey. (1980). 'Rhythm', in: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Edited by Stanley Sadie. London/Washington, D.C.: Macmillan/Grove's Dictionaries of Music, pp. 804-824.
Engel, Hans. (1930-1931). 'Rhythmus der Zeit', Musik und Gesellschaft - Arbeitsblaetter fur soziale Musikpflege und Musikpolitik, : 54-56. Reprinted in: Texte zur Musiksoziologie. Edited by Tibor Kneif. Cologne: Arno Volk-Verlag Hans Gerig, 1975, pp. 170-172.
Gurlitt, Willibald. (1954). 'Form in der Musik als Zeitgestaltung', in: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz: Abhandlungen der Geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, no. 13.
Hanslick, Eduard. (1986). On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music. Edited by Geoffrey Payzant. Eighth ed. Translated by Geoffrey Payzant. n.p.: Hackett Publishing Company.
Hornbostel, Erich Maria von. (1911-12). 'Arbeit und Musik', Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft, xiii: 341ff.
Kramer, Jonathan D. (1988). The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. New York/London: Schirmer Books/Collier MacMillan.
Kurth, Ernst. (1969). Musikpsychologie. Hildesheim, New York: Georg Olms Verlag.
Lorenz, Alfred. (1966). Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner. Band I: Der musikalische Aufbau des Buehnenfestspieles Der Ring des Nibelungen. 2nd ed. Tutzing: Hans Schneider.
Muller-Blattau, J. (1952). Das Verhaeltnis von Wort und Ton in der Geschichte der Musik: Grundzuge und Probleme. Stuttgart:
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1856). 'Essai sur l'origine des langues', in: Oeuvres Completes, I. Edited by Charles Lahure. Paris: L. Hachette, pp. 370-408.
Sachs, Curt. (1953). Rhythm and Tempo. A Study in Music History. Morningside Book ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sapir, Edward W. (1921). 'The Musical Foundations of Verse', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 20: 213-28.
Schutz, Alfred. (1976). 'Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship', in: Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. Edited by Arvid Brodersen. Phaenomenologica 15. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 159-179.
Stein, Jack M. (1960). Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Westphal, Rudolph. (1880). Allgemeine Theorie der musikalischen Rhythmik auf Grundlagen der Antiken und unter Bezugnahme auf ihren historischen Anschluss an die Mittelalterliche, mit besonderer Beruecksichtigung von Bach's Fugen und Beethoven's Sonaten. Leipzig: Breitkopf &
Wiora, Walter. (1957). 'Musik als Zeitkunst', Die Musikforschung, x: 15ff.Michael Morse
e-mail: MMORSE@VM1.YorkU.CACOPYRIGHT NOTE: Copyright remains with authors, but due reference should be made to this journal if any part of the above is later published elsewhere.
Electronic Antiquity Vol. 1 Issue 3 - August 1993 edited by Peter Toohey and Ian Worthington antiquity-editor@classics.utas.edu.au ISSN 1320-3606