By "Distracted" and "Lazy" I Actually Mean "Potentially Stoned Out of His Mind"

I think I’m ready to take a seat all the way down at the “Collective Perspective” end of the invention continuum that LeFevre proposes. I particularly enjoyed the arguments that suggest language itself is actually a collective force because it reminds me of what a distracted, lazy professor once told me Stanley Fish’s There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech...And it’s a Good Thing Too is about, even though to my knowledge, this is not Fish’s main focus in that book.

So maybe Stanley Fish would agree with this, or maybe he wouldn’t. I don’t care. The distracted, lazy professor’s explanation of Stanley Fish is what I’m most interested in right now. Basically, the argument isn’t concerned with the First Amendment but with our actual utterances instead. It goes like this: Not only is meaning in people, but meaning is contextual. Every single one of our utterances, regardless of the opinion we express, is socially constrained by our attempts to package our messages in a way that makes sense to others.

Without the agreement of others, our words don’t mean a thing. Add to this the need to meet some basic grammatical requirements in order to be understood. If we were really free to speak whatever we wanted, nobody would be able to comprehend anything that anybody else was saying – it would all be gibberish. This is why it’s actually a “good thing” that there’s no such thing as free speech. Of course, another way of looking at it would be to get upset that the social is robbing us all of our freedom.

Because language is collective force, rhetorical invention must also be a collective force. I can dig that. Now, I’d like to thank Karen Burke LeFevre, Hilary Putnam, Ferdinand de Saussure, Stanley Fish, my lazy, distracted professor, and everyone who tacitly agrees with the general meaning of these words for making this post possible.