Page 140 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Donkey 115

being-in-the-world, which the text discloses in front of itself by
means of its non-ostensive references’ (Thompson 1981: 192).
7. Free for a new referential value. A de-contextualized text makes
room for a re-contextualization in new situations. Our reading
of the myths will be an attempt of that sort. The impossibility of
putting ourselves in the originary relation of speaking to hearing,
apparently a serious handicap as it cuts the myth off from an
irretrievable condition of dialogical discourse, actually places
it as text at our entire disposal. Distancing and objectification
of the myth as text become the condition of possibility of our
interpretation, and of another regime of cultural confrontation
and inter-cultural interbreeding.
8. The sense and the reference. The emergence of that extended
regime of symbolic communication can be referred to Frege
and Ricœur’s distinction, in a proposition, between the sense
and the reference (Clark 1991: 132). The sense is the ideal object
that the proposition intends, and hence is purely immanent in
discourse. The reference is the truth value of the proposition,
its claim to reach reality. The fact is that the referential reality
of the myth is not of the same level as the empirical reference of
the ordinary language. The myth aims at a more fundamental
truth than any descriptive, constative, didactic discourse. The
abolition of a first-order reference is the condition of possibility
for the freeing of that second-order reference, which reaches
the world not only at the level of manipulable objects, but at the
level that Husserl (Housset 2000) designated by the expression
Lebenswelt (life-world) and Heidegger by the expression ‘being-
in-the-world’.

In short, four characteristics severe the myth as text from the initial
act of speech: first, a shift from the event of saying to the meaning of
what is said; second, severance of the latter from the speaker’s intent;
third, instead of a dialogical relation, an inter-cultural dialectic through
a text available to any audience; and fourth, instead of a reality shared
as reference, new referential dimensions inaugurated by processes of
interpretation.
These four characteristics make room for a new and wider horizon
of symbolic exchange and cultural encounter in indefinitely new spaces