Immanence and Immanent Truth

Abstract

In a recent attempt to account for the cathartic power of traditional expressive speech forms, I introduced the notion of commemorative discourse, which is differentiated from its counterpart, informative discourse, on the basis of referential, structural, and acoustic properties (McDowell 1992). With regard to spoken discourse, informative utterance typically exhibits irregular (or only slightly regularized) prosodies and its referential capacity takes in the whole sweep of routine experience. Commemorative utterance, in contrast, exhibits more regularized prosodies in the process of asserting or formulating something that I called immanent truth, by which I intended approximately the set of ideas, values, and associations that are in some sense constitutive of the collectivity.