Simple Forms

permits us to extrapolate from given historical constellations of the simple forms to ‘particular styles of lived experience’, or ‘cognitive styles’

each simple form as the reflection in language of a particular mode of human engagement with the world:

In a classic work, Jean Paulhan analysed what he called ‘la preuve par l’étymologie’

At this point, we are in a position to conjecture the preconditions necessary for the existence of such an inchoate experience, at the same time that we can separate out its social forms of expressivity (which to be sure have their own historical preconditions); and something like a gestus or a simple form becomes historically visible.

Experience is an inchoate yet original subjective substance which is then shaped and named, and in effect given form, by pre-existing social and collective categories – words and expressions (sayings!) that seem to organize it, named emotions which appear to identify it, articulations familiar to others (familial, group, ethnic, even universal–philosophical) and which now allow me to see what has happened to me in relatively accessible signifiers, however much I want to give them a more unique and distinctive twist and slant, a personal mark, a kind of singularity I can own or defend as belonging (in public) to a privacy and a self.

But ‘experience’ is a productive concept only when it is articulated in terms of an opposition between form and content, for it must in fact be identified with both.

folk-saying as such also an element in the wisdom of the community, a sentence that sums up the experience of the group in question,

The riddle becomes the discourse of authority, the questioning of a judge, the very instance of judgment itself and of ultimate knowledge and the knowledge of secrets

Here Jolles offers an interesting parallel to Brechtian usage, where the gestus is a whole unity of situation and reaction captured as a unique act.

Sprachgebärde, or what we might translate as a ‘verbal gesture’ or gestus, a term not fully assimilable to the common ‘gesture’ of English usage, which is most often a simple physical movement.