“ultimately all the meaning of all words is derived from bodily experience”
-Bronislaw Malinowski-
(from The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages)
Tag: Human
Midterms
3,111 words into a midterm exam…welcome breaks:
Becoming Human: Asking after the Nature of Nobody
“What, in summary, is the nature of the singular entity referred to by the word ‘I’ in judgments like ‘I am in pain’? Answer: since those uses of ‘I’ do not refer, the question is nonsensical. One might as well ask after the nature of Nobody.”
-John Canfield-
“The ‘main point’ is rarely extricable from the digressions. Every section spills into every other… [he] no longer knows what he was talking about.”
-R. M. Berry-
It grows hair. It remembers things differently. It is singing as if in a mumbling voice. Yesterday I got angry.
It thinks, but after talking with the child I was upset with, it revises its conception, taking into account that she said I exhibited joy. Yesterday I was happy.
This glassy essence.
“I will need to accomplish a task tomorrow,” it thinks, in a manner different from image, music or text. It can almost see me doing it – in a situated context – surrounded by people (other ones), objects, time and space. Not essentially. Well, maybe.
It calls to mind (read fabricates) what I was like two decades ago. I was climbing mountains then, most often alone (i.e. not in the company of additional humans), still it is able to consider me there. There where? It imagines Long’s Peak in Colorado (in neither image, language nor feeling – it cannot recall particulars well enough to reconstruct)…it senses I was there. It is reading in a diary.
Does this make it me? The same as the I who wrote it, camping somewhere along the Eastern slope of Long’s Peak in 1995, apparently gladly absent of friend, foe, spouse or tamed animal counterpart?
I had a pack full of peanut butter and potatoes, a couple jugs of water, a tent, a cloak, a knife, an assortment of pens, books and blank journals. It roughly remembers some of that.
It reflects (not to itself – that doesn’t even make sense) – must be a sort of nuanced synonym for thinking – (with itself? of itself? nonsense, it simply reflects) – I’m sitting cross-legged on a small clearing near a frothy crystalline stream within a circle of baby pines, trying to read philosophy texts packed in for the purpose of uninterrupted, or it could be me yet-to-come as distinguished by Swiss mountains and an understood language barrier protecting my solitude along with evident (it imagines) distance (and therefore time) between whatever residents might exist and I. It (hypothetically) notices that (well, enough to pick out an “I” on the Jungfrau or Matterhorn).
But that has happened too. Does the case that it conceives me thus proscribe an identity? It isn’t sure, but there are similarities of some variety. It isn’t saying for certain (the fact is it could say “for certain” but what might that establish as regards me?) – the appearance and accidents, character and behavior are in many ways inexact and altered – but for pragmatic and discriminatory purposes – it would designate me “me” (if it were in conversation or thinking extrinsically).
Could it really say, most definitely, that I was there? Any more than that I will be? It is uncertain, entirely possible.
This glassy essence.
It remains, for now.
Thinking of the time I was writing this (nearly now but just before). It is writing, but not this, I have written this, it is aware, but only just before or just after – that it is I.
It writes.
“…man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.”
-Shakespeare, Measure for Measure–
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-
The Nothingness of Symbols
a drowning. a submersion. a baptism (immersion)
I am drinking the arbitrary nothingness of symbols.
I am writing.
Writing is both a cry and a response.
Intuition / rationalization.
Nurtured and natural.
In the realm of symbols, I am safely between. In the place of no safety. The nowhere realm – a world of now here.
Where I am drowning. Delirious. Drunken on these symbols, arbitrary and well-developed, representative and unnecessary (?) signs.
I am alive.
Combining intellect to emotion to situation and its social constituents…I am writing, uttering, verbalizing –
– and, by chance, perhaps, you are here.
I am side-swiped. Side-tracked.
In other words,
I set out to circumlocute on this very “subject” / “topic” / “matter”…yesterday…
resulting in a nothing of the kind.
Drowning in a limitation of symbols –
“composition,” we call it,
“For it is in the nature of language, as I have already noted briefly, that it is governed by the principle of ‘duality of functioning’,..to be more specific, the distinctive features of the sound system that constitute a language are determined by the limited set of phonemes employed in constructing the next unit up, morphemes. And morphology is determined by the uses to which morphemes are put in forming lexemes or words. Words, in their turn, are formally describable by the functions they perform in sentences. Sentences, in turn, achieve their significance from the discourse in which they are embedded. Discourse is governed by the communicative intentions of the speakers. The communicative intentions of speakers, of course, are governed by the transactional requirements of the culture. And along the way, there are further determinants of form that operate in this same way…”
-Jerome Bruner-
That sickness, that plenitude, those realistic illusions – as if one were totally absorbed in the unrealities of the human way of being-in-the-world.
“the world is not what we thought it was”
-Jim Harrison-
There will be a day my sons will die.
Hopefully I will be gone.
My spouse will die.
Hopefully I will be gone.
There is a word for things that hold too much (e.g. “things that can hold no more”)
Things at, or beyond, capacity.
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. They are drunk, drowned, saturate.
And still there are fresh occurrences.
There are also #s, codes, algorithms, symbols…
I like the idea of doing something that matters, of being someone that matters, of my strange happenstance of existing as an organism having some effect, making some verifiable difference in a larger web of existing things
liking the idea certainly doesn’t make it so
and yet, perhaps,
My intention had been to talk about the wonder…
…that out of 26 letters…
this many years (generations, eons)
and variety
had even occurred.
Was all.
that meaning, is interesting, is cool
that, to (lil’ ol’) me…
it’s amazing…!
in 26 letters
#s, symbols, diagrams
we keep constructing…
Being Human – Voracious, Delusional, Fantastic
I get a little weary of philosophy. It fascinates and intrigues, has its spectacular, glittering moments of what feels like beauty and “accomplishment” – like architecture, the sciences and arts, studies human and social and hard. But with each human activity and behavior there can be too much of a good thing. Perhaps it’s the fantasies involved in abstraction – in the feeling of “figuring things out,” or of “making sense” – our human super-additives to experience that are also experience themselves – that I, at times, weary of. That eminently falsifiable intuition that everything is made up.
web perhaps called “self”
imagined universal web of matter & energy
It is extremely hard work to keep up a worldview. Involving enormous complexities and details, layer up on layer and strand interweaving strand of biological and logical, illogical, psychological, irrational, emotional, – ologies and descriptions, manipulated perceptions and re-interpretations of interpretations reinterpreted (ad infinitum) – it takes matter and energy, and particular organisms, which grow tired.
Those same realities, capacities and activities are also extremely inspiring, enervating and exciting for organisms – the behaviors of productivity, creativity, imagination and survival – and our weird confounding capacity to think we can observe our perceptions/observations to an infinite regress, make for a very strange frenzy of energy and matter indeed.
In a possibly (?!) infinitely webbed interdependence with our surround copious possibilities of activity are available – all bewildering: chaos can be so generative. Chaos can be so nullifying.
What might we know?
And why do we want to?
- That we are organism within dynamic systems? (How would we know that, from within the systems?)
- That we are dynamic organisms alongside other dynamic forms of matter and energy? (Sometimes seems to be our sense of it – that we might somehow step aside – wha-?!)
and…so…what!?
Alongside and within – in order to be – apparently (that is, according to OUR OWN perceptions) – however would could we exist either detached (abstracted) or without (independently, unattached). To imagine distance, “objectivity,” without the imaginative capacities of fantasy – illusions – for example logic, mathematics, economics, philosophy, psychology – codes and symbols – DElusions in order to play the games in these forms of life we are with delusional sincerity – effectively. And our fantastic delusions or profound poeitic creations are often effective, productive, pragmatic, dynamic and evolving – techniques and time – which would seem to imply that they also are part of being within a myriad of dynamic systems…
…one might suppose (i.e. “hypothesize”); or infer (i.e. “fantasize”)
All an immersion in symbols – languages – stipulated relations – codified behaviors –
– which is what I had set out to consider
drowning in symbols
the wonder and bewilderment of it
the sense of delusion and ecstasy
being human…
Fiction. Fractals. Filosophy.
The WHYs of them:
“semiotics is not about the ‘real’ world at all, but about complementary or alternative actual models of it… an infinite number of anthropologically conceivable possible worlds. Thus semiotics never reveals what the world is, but circumscribes what we can know about it; in other words, what a semiotic model depicts is not ‘reality’ as such, but nature as unveiled by our method of questioning. It is the interplay between ‘the book of nature’ and its human decipherer that is at issue.”
-Thomas Sebeok-
“the forms and laws in our worlds do not lie ready-made to be discovered but are imposed by world-versions we contrive – in the sciences, the arts, perception, and everyday practice. How the earth moves, whether a world is composed of particles or waves of phenomena, are matters determined not by passive observation but by painstaking fabrication…Constable urged that painting is a science, and I suggest that science is a humanity.”
-Nelson Goodman-
“a mobile unsteady structure…with all the bits always moving about, fitting together in different ways, adding new bits to themselves with flourishes of adornment as though consulting a mirror, giving the whole arrangement something like the unpredictability and unreliability of living flesh…The endeavor is not, as is sometimes thought, a way of building a solid, indestructible body of immutable truth, fact laid precisely upon fact…Science is not like this at all.”
-Lewis Thomas-
“Perhaps the best way to think about post-modern self-referentiality is not as a denial of language and literature’s connection to the world but as their self-consciously pointing to themselves trying to point to the world.”
-Robert McLaughlin-
Going on from there…
“For that I blame the craven desire to speak, to write, to be heard.”
-Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet–
Semantic Animals
It goes on. Seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, I read. I write. In dilettante-like forays into advanced mathematics, physics, cognitive sciences and biology, I learn:
“The first message is that there is disorder”
(-James Yorke, attributed with naming the science known as Chaos)
So back to first principles (they have a habit of coming in threes, and splitting into fragments). I take out a blank sheet of paper, filled with lines. A patterned absence. Boundarying void. I write “seduced” because I’m thinking about language. Thinking instinct and survival and desperate need. Thinking overload, “more than you could possibly imagine.” Semantic animals.
When I last saw the snow fall, it was raining, offering an impression of “wet.”
She is far from me in two dimensions. Only two, of multiples of three. I count by the “trick of the nines.”
If only there were a way to collect accurate data. Then adequately calculate and organize. Unfortunately, life is mostly made of problems existing on continuums of countless dynamic variables, most of which – unsolvable. They call these “differential,” or Derrida’s Infinitude of Differance. Professionals finally agreeing: “regularity is aberration.”
We search for patterns. Even in chaos we find them (or create). Seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, we “read.” There are so many oscillating signals that even the few we don’t inherently tune out we call “noise.”
Philosophically, on the other hand, where I feel more like an amateur or novice, I understand the problem/hypothesis/theory equation to be: EVERYTHING goes into EVERYTHING, that we’re only ever engaging possibilities. That probables are fleeting, and certainties are few: You are limited, peculiar, and definitely will die.
In other words, “the very process of cutting up and cutting off, opens up and opens out,” or some of us are developing “a belief in the musicality of creative disjunction” (Lance Olsen), because, seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols, we select and collage our own inspection.
It’s easy to forget the first things that we find, i.e. that all positive statements and beliefs are built on “that there is disorder,”
and seduced (sickened and soothed) by symbols,
we go on from there.
RE-GIFTING PRESENTS, part 1: Inhabiting the Medium We Inhabit
This post is an attempt at exploring and hopefully explicating (at least a little) a dialogue that began in a series of comments between the excellent thinker/writer Tocksin and myself. The comment thread can be read in full here (if you wish), but I will highlight two sections for purposes of this post:
tocksin says: I am noticing we two like to wax philosophical at the expense of letting our characters speak. We are mere babes in the woods being raised by wolves. Tooth and nail we will fight to have our day. Write we must.
N Filbert says: I find that to be true – what you say about being babes in the woods. Wrestling with everything else inhabiting our medium.
tocksin says: Let me feel you more with what you mean by wrestling with everything else inhabiting our medium.
At which point I made some bumbling effort toward it, seemingly tangling into more confusion. And was set thinking – how would I verbalize what I mean by the wrestling that using language is? The next two (or more) posts will be my preliminary attempt to language into it.
I interpreted Tocksin’s first message (above) to concern our propensity as writers to be unable to “leave ourselves out of it” (e.g. to let plot and characters, narrative and action be), rather than to voice-in, reflect, trouble and scrutinize our place in the mix of it, the ourness in the howness of any languagings aboutness. “Tooth and nail we will fight to have our day. Write we must.”
All of this started rattling about in my old noggin with what darts around in there from Wittgenstein, William James, Gertrude Stein, Bakhtin, M.A.K. Halliday, J.R. Firth, Benjamin Whorf, C.S. Peirce, Edward Sapir, Peter Berger, and thousands of other voices and ideas regarding LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, BEING, PERCEPTION, etc…
As far as I can tell, these relations have concerned humans since humans have experienced concern. Who are we? What are we? How are we? When are we? even from time to time expeditioning toward Why?
A few posts ago I quoted Judith Butler from her Excitable Speech to the tune of:
“language is not a tool that merely allows meaning to happen. Rather, the relation between language and its users represents a complex ‘matrix of intelligibility’ that makes us readable to one another. Language, in other words, represents a framework that constitutes both the ‘doing’ and the ‘doer’ alike: the subject always exists in a condition of relation to language that implicates the person using it, as much as the addressee – ‘we do things with language…produce effects with language, and…do things to language’ because ‘language is the thing that we do.’ (from Christina Milletti).
Much greater minds than mine have attempted to tackle this – in language, with language, to language, as well as in painting and music, film and image and architecture and dance: Who are we? What are we? How are we? When? What is? Happening? Basic problems of being as faced by our particular type of organism’s means of awareness: senses, perceptive apparatus, and largish brain – all inputting and outputting, inter- intra- extra- extro-putting simultaneously.
Due to our conditions, one of the stickiest problems seems insurmountable – the ability to experience (consciously) BEING. Or NOW. The Present. IS-ness.
In our splendiferous operations of surviving/existing, the mechanisms and processes of doing so (predictive, inductive, deductive, collaborative, receptive, perceptive, oscillatory, responsive, reactive, self-generated, externally infringed, incited, and so on – AMAZING processes!) TAKE TIME, if only nanoseconds…all to say that our perception and/or sensation of being and existing NECESSARILY are not simultaneous to its occurrence, and yet also ARE, because the organizing and perceiving of our activity also constitutes our experiences AS they occur.
This is one of the reasons William James insists on the metaphor of “stream” for our being.
Here he writes on introspection (self-reflection, becoming conscious of consciousness, or perceiving perception – what language and symbols, signs allow, enable, concoct):
“introspecting the contents of that stream, more precisely, a particular item floating along it, interrupts the streaming, arrests the item (or objectifies), detaches and isolates it. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is…As a snow-flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.”
And is also experience, experience becoming.
As I am considering language, that is – assigning description, value, reality using symbol/sign/or index to something in human experiences – I am presenting a coming-to-terms (languaging) for myself of what I attempted (languaging) to “mean” (communicate, share, RELATE) in my off-handed comment to Tocksin regarding “wrestling with everything inhabiting our medium,” as well as an hypothesis that has been haunting me since.
“Wrestling with our medium/habitat – language” means for me in this way: As I conceive (language) the being or existence of the human organism, I interpret an organism of proactive and retroactive complex processes organizing and imputing value to its environment, selectively perceiving and constructing a context or situation in which it can get what it needs to survive. In the scheme of things (or, its organismal specificities IN RELATION TO other organisms and contexts) the human has developed metaphoric and metonymic signification capacities for purposes of more efficient and productive navigation / survival.
Language, (or humans as semiotic beings) then is a medium in the sense of a manipulator of gaps, or a “thing” insofar as it operates between, RELATIONALLY. Signs are always IN RELATION TO. Inner experience, outer experience, communication, description, definition, etc…a SHARED HABITAT, an activity, indeed a primary thinking process – signing experience is a composition, exploration, examination and organizing (improvisational and purposive) of our world and our perceptual relations within experience of it.
Signing – languaging world – is for us our activity of finding out, making sense, interpreting, composing and exploring being/existing.
So when we go with purpose to the page to write language – all of this is inherent to the medium – we make our world (as we experience it) inhabit language so that we can experience it and also we inhabit language in order to experience (perceive our perceiving, become conscious of our awareness). Language is the “stuff”(?) – the medium – the lubricant of passage between ourselves and our senses and perceptions; and everything beyond those individual sensings and perceptions. Thinking organizes and determines experience.
So self-consciously involving ourselves in language opens up all our experience (known and unknown, much like dreams) to be wrestled with in attempting to make a poem, a story, a report, or a conversation, or, even, a thought.
That is part of what I was trying to say, Tocksin. Part two will be the idea that has haunted me since…
Immediate sources referenced:
Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry. U. of California Press, 2000.
R.M. Berry & Jeffrey Di Leo, editors. Fiction’s Present:Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation. SUNY Press, 2008.
Gyorgy Buzsaki. Rhythms of the Brain. Oxford, 2011.
Rudolfo Llinas. I of the vortex. MIT Press, 2002.
William James. Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, 1981.
Other Worlds / Our World … as conceived by a Semiotic Animal
The following is, again, a fairly dense essay, but I find the content so fascinating and very well presented. The concepts and observations herein form a central core of what I desire to use language to explore – signs upon signs within signs over signs – living in the specificity of our species – and attempting to discover what/where/how that specificity (namely language) might lead/take/auto-generate itself forward. If these sorts of things interest you as well, i encourage you to lend Deely’s writing your time.
(click here for essay) – Umwelt by John Deely
All my Words are Silent 