Gates and The Signifying Monkey

For the sake of throwing something up here, below are my notes for my presentation tom...today--the presentation I have to give in less than 6 hours! Oh how I need this term to end.

Anyway, I really would like to read Gates's entire book. It reminded me of some great conversations I had with my friend Yonika as an undergraduate. I'm sure I've got a lot more to say on this, but not at 2:47 a.m.

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Henry Louis Gates Jr. (b. 1950—currently Professor/Program Director at Harvard)
“The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning” Taken from The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988)

This particular work by Gates is significant not only in enriching our understanding of Black English, but it “has important implications for the development of rhetorical theory because it suggests that Black English is a fertile field for studying the ideological and epistemological powers of rhetoric conceived as a general theory of language” (1544).

The features of the black dialect of English have long been studied and have been found to be grammatical and a dialect as much as Standard English is a dialect, “albeit a socially privileged one” (1544).

Bizzell and Herzberg point out that “language and culture are inseparable, and though it is common practice to forget the cultural forces at work in descriptions of Standard English—that is, white English—it is impossible to forget, when examining the development of Black English, the often agonized relationship between white people and black people in the United States” (1544).

B&H note three settings for speech interactions in black communities: 1. The church, where speaking includes both sermons and responses by congregants; 2. The street, where talk is an interaction between equals; 3. The home, where talk is dominated by the mother. (1545)

“A distinct feature between black rhetoric and what we might call white rhetoric is the typical relationship between speaker and audience. In most white speech interactions, as in traditional classical rhetoric, the speaker speaks and the audience listens; in black speech interactions, the audience responds almost constantly, with set responses, encouragement, suggestions, and nonverbal signals. … Black discourse is…highly ‘dialogic.’” (1546)

Given this information, it wasn’t a surprise when I found out that the film “Hustle and Flow” (seen here) won the Audience Award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

B&H say “the street” is the scene for the most complex conversation-performance exchanges, with three main purposes: exchange information; enact social relationships of friendship, kinship, and business; and to establish the speaker’s social status (1546). I might say the “street” is any social setting where verbal play can create solidarity and competitiveness. (See: the basketball courts at Dixon. Good times.)

Forms of discourse are more closely related in black speech than in white; in other words, conversation and formal speeches are more similar in black speech, whereas they are more distinct in white speeches. (This makes sense, of course, considering the more dialogic nature of Black English in general.)

Important to note that tropes are artful substitutions of one term for another for rhetorical effect—as defined by Quintilian. For Gates, Signifyin(g) is the ultimate trope. Signifying is the “general term for several forms of persuasion, insult, boasting, or lying, all by innuendo or indirection…may be verbal, in prose, or verse, or nonverbal, using gesture. …sounding…[is] direct insult, boast, or lie” (1547—list)

“A trope is, literally, a turn. In traditional rhetoric, tropes turn words away from their ‘literal’ meaning to a metaphorical one” (1549).

Some verbal tropes:
Signifying
Playing the dozens (yo mama)
Any jargon (spit, chronic, 6-4, and on and on)
Meaning reversal (“my nigga” is a hotly debated one)
Hyperbole

Nonverbal:
pitch
emphasis
marking (spelling out blood with hands; peace signs; c-walk)

Often these insults can be playful—occasionally they may create tension.

“And finally, in a double bind that undercuts the self-image of black men, the official standards of the community may characterize the whole assemblage of street forms and tropes as adolescent—or at least rude” (1549). Many concerned leaders (black leaders) in black communities fight against street forms and tropes, trying to clean up the language and the images of what they think is a flawed youth culture.

Sociolinguists have done extensive work showing that Black English is not merely incorrect Standard English—they’ve explored the “background not only of African languages but also of tribal culture and social structures, myths, and music.” By studying community behaviors, Gates studies not only linguistics but rhetoric, and “his analysis is located at a critical juncture of culture, linguistic operation, social interaction, and political marginality. Gates is forced to be inclusive, to see rhetoric as the connective force and to see tropes as cognitive and epistemic forms of language. Here, rhetoric means daily speech as a form of action” (1549).

“Gates notes that signifying, the act of linguistic misdirection, ironically redirects the white word for the passive act of representation. Black rhetoric seems to say (as modern literary and rhetorical theory says) that representing meaning is not passive, that it is the greatest trickery of all” (1550).

From The Signifying Monkey:

“’Signification,” in standard English, denotes the meaning that a term conveys, or is intended to convey. It is a fundamental term in the standard English semantic order. …By supplanting the received term’s associated concept, the black vernacular tradition created a homonymic pun of the profoundest sort, thereby making its sense of difference from the rest of the English community of speakers.

“To revise the received sign … is to critique the nature of (white) meaning itself, to challenge through a literal critique of the sign the meaning of meaning. What did/do black people signify in a society in which they were intentionally introduced as the subjugated, as the enslaved cipher? Nothing on the x axis of white signification, and everything on the y axis of blackness” (1553).

“It would be erroneous even to suggest that a concept can be erased from its relation to a signifier. … “All homonyms depend on the absent presence of received concepts associated with a signifier” (1554).

“Whereas signification depends for order and coherence on the exclusion of unconscious associations which any given word yields at any given time, Signification (black replacement of meaning) luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of these associative rhetorical and semantic relations. Lacan calls these vertically suspended associations ‘a whole articulation of relevant contexts,’ by which he means all of the associations that a signifier carries from other contexts, which must be deleted, ignored, or censored ‘for this signifier to be lined up with a signified to produce a specific meaning.’ Everything that must be excluded for meaning to remain coherent and linear comes to bear in the process of Signifyin(g).”

“Signifyin(g), in Lacan’s sense, is the Other of discourse; but it also constitutes the black Other’s discourse as its rhetoric. Ironically, rather than a proclamation of emancipation from the white person’s standard English, the symbiotic relationship between the black and white, between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, between black vernacular discours and standard English discourse, is underscored here, and signified, by the vertiginous relationship between the terms signification (standard) and Signification (black), each of which is dependent on the other. We can, then, think of American discourse as both the opposition between and the ironic identity of the movement, the very vertigo, that we encounter in a mental shift between the two terms.”

Gary Saul Morson on Bakhtin: “The audience of a double-voiced word is therefore meant to hear both a version of the original utterance as the embodiment of its speaker’s point of view (or ‘semantic position’) and the second speaker’s evaluation of that utterance for a different point of view. I find it helpful to picture a double-voiced word as a special sort of palimpsest in which the uppermost inscription is a commentary on the one beneath it, which the reader (or audience) can know only by reading through the commentary that obscures in the very process of evaluating.”

“The motivated troping effect of the disruption of the semantic orientation of signification by the black vernacular depends on the homonymic relation of the white term to the black. The sign, in other words, has been demonstrated to be mutable” (1556).