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Into Letters…Words…Language
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Category: Current Reading
What I’m buried in this week or this moment
Our Propensities
“identifying a function for dreams or pretend play or fiction doesn’t mean that we’ve identified the function”
-Jonathan Gottschall-
I am enjoying this book more than I expected. Often overview-type books of aspects of human phenomena leave me with a touch of “yeah, we all know that (i.e. we experience that), but tell us something new, give us opportunities to create knowledge from new data!” Gottschall’s book is a well-written tour (akin to the work of de Botton on aspects of human life) – representative of current knowledge, suggestive rather than pedantic, and fluidly engaging.
“Consider the following information:
Todd rushed to the store for flowers.
Greg walked her dog.
Sally stayed in bed all day.
Quick, what were you thinking?…
In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story…studies show that if you give people random, unpatterned information, they have a very limited ability not to weave it into a story…the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t…it’s usual method is to fabricate the most confident and complete explanatory stories from the most ambiguous clues…the Sherlock Holmes in our brains job is to ‘reason backwards’ from what we can observe in the present and show what orderly series of causes led to particular effects…we will always rather fabulate a story than leave experience unexplained.”
And so on. In fact, the sentences he writes above are on-the-fly conjured random fact-statements unrelated. Most of us probably had already begun to fit it into something ‘meaningful to us’ before we finished the third one. Does this help you see how your view and perspective on reality – your ‘automatic’ or instinctual or deferral mode comprehension ALWAYS needs sorted out with CONTEXT and the empirical world? Our minds are amazing and unbelievable in their functions and operations (literally), factories of fictions based on ancient genetic messages qua homo sapien, empirical experiences from our own individual lifespans, and an untangleable web of socio-cultural input and in-formation. We’re fascinating…and utterly unreliable. Thus we have each other, and our senses and myths and science and all sorts of other-world perspectives to adjust and possibilize our own stories. Perhaps there are moments our thoughts align with facts, but those will be rare in our lives.
Taken in a context of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, John Canfield’s Becoming Human and Alan Singer’s The Self-Deceiving Muse, Gottschall’s delightful foray into the impulsivity of fiction-like brain behavior makes for a savory meal. I’m concocting stories about it even now (it’s sure).
Situating Language
“ultimately all the meaning of all words is derived from bodily experience”
-Bronislaw Malinowski-
(from The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages)
RESPOND
Midterms
3,111 words into a midterm exam…welcome breaks:
In Essence
“It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of “ego” in reality, in its reality which is that of the being.
The ‘subjectivity’ we are discussing here is the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as ‘subject.’ It is defined not by the feeling which everyone experiences of being himself…but as the psychic unity that transcends the totality of the actual experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness. Now we hold that ‘subjectivity,’ whether it is placed in phenomenology or in psychology, as one may wish, is only the emergence in the being of a fundamental property of language. ‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’ That is where we see the foundation of ‘subjectivity,’ which is determined by the linguistic status of ‘person.'”
-Emile Benveniste-
“signification occurs only through discourse, that discourse requires a subject, and that the subject itself is an effect of discourse.”
-Kaja Silverman-
Sunday – A Trinity of Influence(s?)
Carpe Diem
What I Was Meaning To…
“Abandoned Writing Projects” by R. M. Berry, from:
Homo Fictus
“words are not a translation of something else that was there before they were”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
Homo Fictus
“Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories”
-Jonathan Gottschall-
Knowing how / knowing why. Procedures and structures. Diversify and unify. Complexity-to-simplicity turned complex all over again. Reuse and construction. Stories.
We are saturate with story. Each word of that sentence. If I provide the skeleton – you’re sure to flesh it out. The productivity of words, the how & why of humans.
Perhaps I’ll call it “making sense,” but the sense is there before, what follows is a meaning – through procedures and structures, reuse and construction, the wired and the firing, implicity spinning explicitly – and for reasons not yet fully known, I’ve gotta have mine.
“The knowledge of good and evil, all in one. Both.
Somebody finally said, I know my own mind.”
-Janet Kauffman-
Experience is a complex collision I diversify and unite. Following patterns infused by my own. If you provide a list of observations and complaints, I may spend entire days reorganizing them – they didn’t quite “fit.” Perhaps I’ll throw them back. I’d like to be certain.
“the absence of doubt is of the essence of a language-game”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
A personalized language-game full of cues, thesauri and symbols – my controlled vocabulary meshing your data…
“The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told.
I have to tell it myself.
What is it I have to tell myself again and again?
That there is always a new beginning, a different end.
I can change the story. I am the story.
Begin.”
-Jeanette Winterson-
…ah, now I’ve figured it out (made it fit my form) – this is my story now, please listen and confirm (complexity-simplicity) – oh no? you don’t? (complexity again) and back to the storyboards or diary…
The yearn is toward some balance, stasis, surety. Re-cognizable re-currency. Re-presentation. Re-anything. Want familiar. The excitement may very well come with the disruptions, eruptions, defamiliarization, the constant change – it certainly heightens our senses and intension – the thrill is in the thunderous gathering of troops – flickering flashing neurons – dogs set on the intrusion…but soon we stabilize the perimeter again…incorporate the drama…
“the important thing is to consider the significance of things and not to worry about their authenticity…it’s difficult to tell at the end of the day whether it was theory or need that got you through it.”
-Joy Williams-
…with our stories (and lies)…our illusory perceptions…needing organized to our organism…and tales are conjured, fiction begins, typing on our limited keys…
…even while the body’s at rest…
“in short, nothing so central to the human condition is so incompletely understood”
-Jonathan Gottschall-
this post inspired in part by
All my Words are Silent 