rough draft of tomorrow night's paper:
just trying to get a handle on all this “word” stuff
first, what they are, what they mean to us and what they do to us, and second, why it matters whether we say them or write them, hear them or write them
bits from last week’s readings, this week’s readings, some stuff I picked up in philosophy classes and a few things that happened to me during the week
stop me if it doesn’t make sense.
start with Descartes:
cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I exist. it sounds like a truism, but the point is that the fact that we think is all we can really be sure of.
and on another level, that thinking is what we are.
but cogito ergo sum never seems like enough to explain what is is to be a human.
even though it may be all we can objectively be sure of, our instincts tell us there is a world out there made up of things and other people.
all the time, we are trying to communicate with each other in a shared world.
there are two roles words can play in thinking and communicating.
we often think that we think in words. but we don’t really. an example: last week I had a dream. in it, I looked at my mobile phone and realized it could tell me who was close by.
but it would take me many many words to explain that exactly, to get across what I saw, what I knew, and how it worked in with the rest of the dream. I didn’t think that in words, I just comprehended it in an instant.
It’s not a case of a picture speaking a thousand words, but of the number of words it takes to actually articulate something you know
but we do act as if we think in words, a lot of the time. phrases like “say what you think” imply that it’s really possible to do so.
so we act as if the cogito, the thinking self, can actually be expressed, got across, communicated, through the medium of words. (whether written or spoken)
( as a aside: I’m not going to get into all that mind-body split, except to say it was one of the other really useful ideas Descarte articulated; a lot of cybertheory is about what the “pure mind” world does to the body and the relationship between the two and/or whether you really can split the mind and the body – tonight I’m going to stick to mind stuff. )
so to the extent that we treat the word as a manifestation of the self – think of the manifesto – manifest, to be, “o”, I – so the **list of manifestos
darren(49) says literacy is a way of mediating consciousness, in effect – we use the technology of language to construct the thoughts that are us.
he says it’s an alphabetical mediation; I think it’s also a word mediation, full stop.
– and what a difference it makes to be able to write it down, to send it off into the blue, to use our power of speech, of telling people of ourselves and issuing commands, at a distance? (telepresence)
that’s why I don’t think we can really claim that we live in a “oral culture”, despite the amazing amount of talking that goes on.
the practice and possibility of recording words and passing on ideas between people who have never met, of posthumous letters and directions given at a distance, took the thing that it is to be a human – to think – and effectively made it separate from actual humans (some people call this a realising of the mind-body split, but I think the mention of bodies in that context is a bit distracting from the real point of presence – which of course you need bodies for – as distinct from non-presence.)
Darren (39) puts it this way “the locus of such a culture was the …. association of a person’s physical presence with their being”
Havelock – though I think he goes way too far in saying “speech is primary” – does make a good point about numbers and how much easier they were to develop. I think this might have been because numbers, per se, aren’t like words; they don’t pretend to stand for our actual thoughts. we don’t think in numbers, we tend to think about them.
if you look at the Mystic Writing Pad, and don’t think about the analogy for memory as much as the writing pad itself; the idea that taking a note is “remembering” a thing itself is exactly where we go wrong, or at least make an assumption.
once you’ve done that, you raise all kinds of questions about what it is that’s being projected, and what it is that makes the thing left behind the “real” person..
and this is what makes recording and communication technologies really interesting; by looking at what we take with us from one “way of being” to the next, I think we can start to work out some things about what we really are, as opposed to how we show it.
for instance, take real spaces vs virtual spaces. before writing and then telecommunications, to share a space with someone had no other meaning except to be in the same space as them physically. but we’ve taken to the idea of virtual spaces like ducks to water – despite Darren’s student who drove three hours to be here, we generally accept that being on the phone with someone is to share a “space” with them, and that each time we go back to the this subject’s Web site, we are entering the same space, even though we may be at school, work or home at the time.
that suggests to me that we have some kind of archetype of space built into us that we can adapt to any environment, and it doesn’t require physicality.
if you look at the way people anthropomorphise computers and cars, it’s a similar thing; we just have a natural tendency to treat things that behave like entities AS entities.
and if they’re entities, we treat them as sharing our world; so they change the very nature of the world for us (all Heideggerian)
anyway, back to words.
not only do we treat words as projecting ourselves & and our thoughts, we can act as if words are things.
there was a quote about “trapped words” in last week’s readings.
there’s also an idea that words are “trapped things”
Havelock (17) talks about three kinds of rudimentary writing – the third is “the act of naming these objects and the art of relating names and therefore objects to each other.”
names and therefore objects. to name is to own. the old magic idea was that your “true name” had a certain power over you.
and the way words call up the thing (logocentrism ? or is this only for the spoken word? Darren,) – the dog called flossie, the horse called flossie etc
it makes us feel like masters of our domain; whereas if you can’t write it down, can’t hold it, you have to deal with it more directly, be involved
(do pictographic languages permit high-level thought to be expressed? surely they must?)
Darren quotes Aristotle, 42, saying that words are the impressions of actual things, and written words are at one remove from the spoken – only signs of something more real.
the Phaedrus piece suggests that writing will in fact take the ideas out of our heads altogether, by weakening our memories. I like to think of it more as a supplement, an extension – but there’s that extension word again. it is an “outering”, as mcluhan would have it.
but there is some truth to it; literacy has become information literacy, the ability to FIND stuff rather than know it. but is that a bad thing?
but it’s all words: Socrates’ piece assumes that speaking was somehow more real, and again, I think both speech and writing have the same limitations of being a system for representing internal truths; I don’t see why one is supposed to be better than the other because we do it with our mouths and not our hands.
(somewhere in the papers last week I saw an article that said that there was/is a gene for being able to talk – something to do with fine motor movements – and it swept through the species incredibly fast.
and I wondered why that was, what a difference there was between the talking and non-talking protohumans that spread the gene so fast. did the talking ones say “let’s kill those non-talking buggers over there”? – or was it more a case of “hey baby, you and me, let’s reproduce”? or just that they became more efficient at the job of staying alive, eating and making sure offspring grew up?
more seriously, I’d like to know what people think of havelock’s idea that speech is “biologically encoded, writing is not”)
anyway, the phaedrus piece is really about authority; about who is saying something. and it still matters today, postmodernism or not, who wrote the words.
besides, dialectic is limited; it is for a few people at once.
on p 138, it talks about needing to have many kinds of knowledge of a thing, not just the name; but we often act as if the name is the thing and knowing it means knowing the thing.
which brings me, again, to the outering that speech and writing constitute, and the idea that writing is a further extension than speech can provide.
Darren says (36) that writing is a technology, that we have to learn to write the characters. I still wonder what the difference is between this and speech? they may be arbitrary characters, but they represent speech more or less exactly.
what is really interesting is the persistence of writing, the ability to make a whole thing of words that, as speech, only exist sequentially. struggling with why the novel is a written form, but the epic poem is oral; the novel is something that comes into being written, is meant to be read exactly as it is written; to some extent I think that makes the words themselves rather than the meaning even more important, increasing the “outering” of meaning in writing. it’s a self-fulfilling importance
so I guess I agree with derrida that they are both a form of writing – at the same time, I’m sympathetic to the further extension possibilities of writing – I’m hoping that through the rest of the course I/we can explore what it is we’re doing when we project ourselves through writing.
and from darren’s summary of derrida (43), we have to grapple with how close we can get to the thing through signs; there is always a differerance, a gap between reality and meaning
and the barthes piece death of the author turns it around, says the action isn’t with the writer but the reader – but I wonder about that when we can “live” in virtual, text-based online communities. another story
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look up what ricour said about print vs the word.
the curse of the self; having a sense of ending. which trees don’t have.
look through Ong
