Here’s the fundamental question it makes me ask: What does “meaning” actually mean?

And yes I get that it is somewhat of a meaningless question – a tautology, as it were. But you see that’s, what the book feels like.

For this post, let me back up for a minute and give you a very basic image that I use to imagine abstraction and how it works. It is my hope that the image will make explaining my problem with this book’s set-up more obvious.

Image a black screen. On the screen near the lower center is a white globe. That white globe is the human body and all its doings, including the apprehension of the world, its assessment and consequent behavioural modification – those things we normally call a mind. Now imagine that the black screen is full of energy packets zooming around. Each of those packets has a very specific shape – triangles, cubes, rhomboids, etc. The white ball has a number of openings that conform to some of the shapes but not to others.

Here is the first layer of meaning. The shapes of energy packets in the black screen beyond the white ball that are not matched by the shapes in the white ball are meaningless. They are invisible, untouchable, silent, tasteless, etc. This layer of meaning is shared by all forms that endure for any length. Complex chemicals “recognize” some other chemicals and not others. Those ones are meaningful to the complex chemical because it can recognize them. This is not self awareness, but it is recognition.

In human beings this layer of meaning is ever present. In this sense there is no moment in the life of a human being in which the universe is meaningless since there is never a time when the basic chemical and sensual recognitions and processes are not ongoing. This has a good deal of impact on Stewart’s fundamental image of darkness and night as formless, with no boundary and therefore not allowing any intersubjectivity or an ongoing dialectic.

Second image: Along with the white sphere there is now a smaller blue sphere. The two spheres are connected; the blue sphere is dependent upon the white one. At the level of mind that starts to create self-aware abstractions (that is meaningful recognitions that endure long enough for those recognitions to be called aware, and be manipulable by the imagination), mini “worlds” are created. A mentally constituted mini world is a blue sphere. The first order meanings that are always ongoing go through a further process if they are neurologically active enough (firing time crosses a time threshold). This later process is founded on the earlier processes but are projected onto a screen of their own – and a mini world is created to rotate, grasp, assess, manipulate the few “recognitions” that are part of the being’s current concern.

What the body does is posit a smaller “body”, limiting the “variables” so that a specific concern can be addressed in a simplified, but still recognizable “field”. This is an abstraction and the blue sphere.

The thing is that once inside the world of the blue sphere the same process can be accomplished and a new tertiary set of spheres be postulated and manipulated. By their nature, these imitation “bodies” – which are abstractions and simplifications – feel like a total world in themselves. But these small blue worlds cannot function as whole worlds, anymore than a virgin can know what sex is like by reading the Kama Sutra. The risk is that the blue sphere “forgets” its connection (and dependency) on the the white sphere. This is when abstractions take on a life of their own and often get completely outside the bounds of reality – and, often, polite society. (Think about the abstraction – women are the source of trouble in men’s lives – when you create a world out of that, you can easily forget that women are also the source of new men (baby boys), the source of much pleasure, and posit a world in which women don’t need to exist – e.g. monasticism. Look at the trouble that has got the Catholic Church into.)

Here is a real world example: Ask yourself the question, How can I live a meaningful life? An abstract-generating question. You might think about ethics, or pleasure, or narrative, or a number of other areas in human life, but in an attempt to answer such a question you are unlikely to include questions like what shall I cook for dinner tonight  or  I wonder who’s scratching at the door. These last two are concerns of the white sphere, but not of this particular blue sphere generated by my question.

But imagine now that you get caught up in this particular blue sphere and your connection is something deep and profound. Then your tummy rumbles. The concern for supper becomes not a concern temporarily set aside, but an intrusion, even a threat to the integrity of the small blue “world”. If you cannot “remember” that the abstract blue world you created to deal with this question of meaning is just an abstracted small portion of the larger real world (the white sphere), then any “foreign” thoughts threaten the new world. In that moment, the unknown presenting itself becomes an act of war.

So back to Stewart: Her abstract world – her blue sphere – is language devoid of bodily sources of meaning.

But I disagree. Night is not formless. The unconscious is merely unaware, not empty. Language is not “a counter to the oblivion of darkness”. I doubt whether language (or poetry) counters anything at all – that is, it isn’t in a combative relationship with the body from which it originates. What combat is created, what need to counter the unseen, comes from this abstraction taking its role as a “world” literally and forgetting to dissolve in the face of the larger needs of the originating body.

What’s the problem with the question? For me the problems begin with the verb “is”. It’s usage in the sentence implies that there is an (one) answer, and that the answer when found will be a necessary and sufficient attribute of the noun “consciousness.” The sentence predisposes one to look for an object that is consciousness and to do so by finding its attributes.

There are so many answers to the question but what if we were to ask the question “What does consciousness do?” Would that change the set of answers? Almost certainly don’t you think?

Which seems to me to say what we are really addressing is not consciousness so much as the structure of the sentence. And this is not the point of asking the question.

If we were to see “consciousness” as just a word we use to speak to a rather fluid set of skills and abilities as those skills and abilities manifest in specific situations, then what would be the questions we would ask? What would be the fundamental assumptions? I suspect this last question is rather important having something to do with how language assumes itself to be to only means of communication open to human beings. I mean even Carl Jung assumed that the unconscious was a symbolic storehouse – that is the experiences we have are stored and activated as symbols – and symbols are very much linguistic artifacts.

Interesting to think about how many varied sets of questions and answers can be generated all around that single word “consciousness”. And if not a linguistically or symbolically structured set of events/actions/predispositions what then is that storehouse we think of as our consciousness and unconscious?

The tour has led me to some interesting things. I was reading the introductory paragraphs over at Arts & Letters Daily and decided to click on “more” under “Errol Morris” (of whom I had never heard, although I did know The Thin Blue Line) and that led me to the original site of the article, which lead me to Morris’ site, which exploded into…

Saul Kripke and the question of how language attaches us to the world, which led to thinking about how the Kripke argument relates to the literary theories of modernism and post-modernism. Which led back to Rilke and his Malte and the question of who was the real poet and whether a thing-in-itself can be said to exist, and the silliness of some questions.

Bertrand Russel and the fun that is his “existentialist’s nightmare” and the threat that taking what you think too seriously which led to some daydreaming about ravens that speak French (Enfin, tu souffres. Enfin, tu existes.), which led to a mild curiosity about what Whorf or Nagel would have made of such a corvid.

Thinking about whether our various senses don’t act a bit like Duchamp’s Nude Descending Staircase. That is, we perceive an enormous amount of material but we only “need” a small fraction of what is perceptible. (The need is based on the current situation and in fact if we did consciously perceive all that our bodies “know” in any given moment we’d go screamingly nuts is very short order and actually walking down a staircase would probably be fatal.) That data which is identified as immediately necessary is tagged and the total of the tagged perceptions are amassed into a coherent moment, which rather than looking like Duchamp’s picture comes to appear to us more like this. In other words, we percieve→react/assess→edit→project/compile→”see”. It is only at the “see” that we become aware and so it is what becomes real.

(another stray curiosity – Duchamp’s painting is an explosion of the eye perceiving and consolidating. I wonder what an equivalent “explosion” would be like for the nose smelling lilac in the enormous welter of alternate spring smells – or the ear hearing a chickadee with traffic in the distance, or the skin when tickled in moving air.)

But back to the original prompt – does that mean we don’t perceive what is “there”? Or that we can’t understand the mind of someone born in another time and place? It seems to me the problem is in the question. They can’t be answered truthfully and more than “have you stopped beating your wife” can – if you’re a person who has never beaten your wife.

Anyway, I’ve spent all morning wandering. I think I’ll take a nap then read a novel. Need to save my energy, going to a poetry reading tonight.

Oh, and I really like Morris’ way of writing.

However, since as a rule language is used to convey meanings rather than merely sounds, semantic coding has a certain primacy over phonetic coding, even in literary language. Whenever possible, we foreground semantic coding; only when something seems to “go wrong” with the semantic coding do we shift our attention to the phonetic coding. In the quotation from Cicero, the like endings have the same meaning, or are the same morpheme, and support the logic of the sentence by virtue of their specific positions; in other words, this sort of stylistic parallel or form of meaning seems to enhance the logic of the sentence, so that the semantic and syntactic coding seem entirely satisfactory, and there is little or no need for readers or listeners to attend to the phonetic coding. Since, however, like endings have similar sounds as well, they draw increased attention from readers or listeners; yet this similarity is used merely to reinforce the similar meanings. This is not so when it comes to rhyme. The greater the difference in the meanings of the rhyming words, the more inclined readers or listeners are to shift attention to their phonetic similarities. In antigrammatical rhyme, the difference in meanings is, by definition, greater than in grammatical rhyme; thus both semantic and phonetic representations participate more actively in the process of perception. (p 73-74)

Isn’t that awesome! Cognitive dissonance, linguistically enabled, as a way to a poetic opening of mind.

Language, of course, is the most universal crossing of all, because transference of meaning — ‘translation’ — is its very nature.

That stopped me cold. I was at the coffee shop; I had to put my book down and drink coffee for a bit to think about what that means.

Now I am no linguist, and there is much I don’t understand about the Saussurean controversy about signs, signifiers and referents, not to mention the current battle between cognitive and generative linguists but it seems to me that underlying that sentence is a couple of rather big assumptions. First, by saying that language is a translator, a threshold technology, the sentence sets the stage for assuming an inside and an outside, a place of meaning and a place of referents. That is, if language “crosses” it implies somewhere to come from and go to.  I presume those “places” to be (at the very least) meaning and the world of objects or referents.

Another possibility here (and not exclusive of the earlier, I suspect) is that what language “crosses” is the distance between words. What I mean by that is that since signs and the concepts they bear are arbitrarily connected (according to Saussure), the fact that there is proposed a distinction between the sign (the WORD) and the signified (the meaning the sign/word bears) seems self-evident but given the findings of cognitive science about the duplicity of “common sense”, that seems warning enough not to take such a presupposition for granted.  But, anyway, if there is a gap between signifier and sign then what “language” may do is leap that gap. Language would be that which connects the uttered or written WORD and what the word means.  So the question then becomes what is language and, secondarily, how does it do that?

The quoted sentence above also presupposes the question it answers, that is “what is the purpose of language.” And that question presupposes the fact that there is a purpose for things, which brings in a huge bag of other assumptions and ways of understanding reality that may not have anything to do with language at all.

If instead we asked what language accomplishes in the life of Homo sapiens and also what made language a successful adaptation, the set of answers (and following structural logic) would be vastly different. If language has no purpose but only a history and a set of incidental uses, then the questions Heaney pursues in Seeing Things would have to be reset.

About Seeing Things O’Donoghue says

The secular mysticism of the book is a celebration of the ordinary, sometimes in its transcendent form, and ordinary language can be drawn on in representing it.

The problem I have with that is the “transcendent form”. It’s the consequence of the underlying assumptions of language being a mediative technology, of needing a place to come from and go to. It’s that basic idea in the West that poetry’s purpose is to lead us to the transcendent (even if it is immanent).

Yuck.

The marvelous doesn’t stem from another world, nor from the spaces between and inside words. It stems from the zinging communication between the limbic, the cortex and the larger body when that network encounters the world in its various “moments”. What are the “moments”? They include the packets of information taken from any given interaction between individual and its environment. When you see a butterfly land on a flower, for example, what you take from that (actually rather huge) interaction, is a very small packet of sensory data because only that packet has immediate import to you as a being. You don’t register, for example, the fly hovering over a fish head 22 blossoms over.

The particular packet is taken (formed) because it is the set of events found meaningful by the body/mind network. That packet is a kind of “moment” and already has meaning even if it is unconscious. Moments act much like signs or symbols. They are codifications carved out of an ocean of possible data based on a set of concerns built into our bodily form. Language is also one of those “moments”; it is a related set of “moments”.  Linguistic signs (whether written or spoken) are codified packets but taken from the vast environment of potential meaning that is being generated in the cerebral/bodily environment.

Secular mysticism is the awe we find in the contemplation of the material world. It doesn’t require a transcendent realm to work. It can be understood as a particular kind of cerebral response to specific packets of environmental material. And since language is a mental response to the same material world, it seems very likely that there are ways to use language to either (or both) mimic or trigger that awe. That’s something we can do with poetry.

Does that make such mimicry or triggering poetry’s purpose? You haven’t been listening.

Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy when ever it came to
Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek.
She'd manage something hampered and askew
Every time, as if she might betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.
With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You
Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

The poem comes from a series of sonnets called “Clearances” in the book The Haw Lantern. The “she” in the poem is Heaney’s mother.

The problem was that Heaney went and got himself better educated than his kin. Well, actually, the education itself wasn’t the issue, it was the speech patterns that went with the education and what they represented. There are lots of reasons to love the poem, but for me, one of the strongest is the exact parallel to Indian English and its role in social cohesion on the rez.

One time in an Indian household of a family member I was obliquely scolded for using too much vocabulary. It marked me as an outsider, and it was important to certain family members that I not be spoken of as such. Once, the same person, when she needed to introduce me to other family members who hadn’t met me yet, stumbled on how to classify me in kinship terms. I’d never seen her at a loss for words before. It told me how unusual my situation was in the larger family and how much she valued me.

My classificatory difficulties meant that what could be controlled needed to be seen to. That included my language usage. Exactly as Heaney put it, my ability to slide into Indian English made my place in the wider family more tenable. Of course no one would mistake me for Rez-bred, nor do I want to be other than I am, but my learning to speak less formally, more in the cadences and grammatical structuring of Salish, allowed a closer sense of kinship.

The thing is that over time I noticed that the linguistic slide went along with a slide in perception. For example, my ways of thinking about imaginative experiences (in the sweat lodge, say) or in my path-crossings with bears, badgers, weasels, porcupines, hawks, eagles, marmots, squirrels, and such like, slid into a different register depending on which English I was using in my head and in my mouth.

I’ve been trying to capture that in poetry.

I sent to a literary magazine a poem that slid part the way through from one register to the other both in the imagery and in the language. They published one of the batch that I had sent but refused that one partly because the editor felt I didn’t have adequate control over my language.

That made me smile. But it also made me despair of ever being able to fashion a poem that simultaneously shows the reader how to read the “slide” and accomplish the “slide” at the same time—which is what would have to happen to enable a “non-sliding” audience to get what’s happening and not assume simple grammatical error.

And of course, that is exactly what Heaney accomplishes in the sonnet above. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. I just love Heaney, despite my disagreement with some of his fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality and language.

Sacks’s book is in three parts. The first is some Deaf history, interesting but not new to me. The last is a recounting of the Deaf President Now protest at Gallaudet University in 1988, not new to me either. The middle part, however, was the most expansive part of the book and included analysis of the consequences of prelingual deafness in hearing societies that want deaf children to act as if they are hearing. (It is not a kindness, believe me.) And, of course, since Sacks is a neurologist the book contains good information about studies and biological evidence of the way in which ASL functions neurologically as a language. One thing of deep interest to me was the way in which the brain organizes visually based syntax (instead of verbal syntax) by routing the visual information into the syntactical areas of the brain and still allows standard visual information (non-syntactical) to operate out of the visual centers. It says that the the critical difference is how information connects and not how it comes into the brain (i.e. through eye or ear). The other wonderful thing about the book was the wealth of other sources to follow up.

One was A Man Without Words. I swallowed it whole one day when I didn’t want to go out. (One of those grey days.) It’s about a deaf man who at the age of 27 had not learned any language at all. In other words, he had no sign language just a few gestures. This means he didn’t even have a name. What he did have, though, was a well developed sense of self. Now that seems to me to be fundamentally important.

So many of the theories of the last decades say, more or less, to be human is to have language and points to sad cases like Genie to show the results of not having language. I’ve always known that language is important to what we are but, still, it can’t be everything. The idea of the equation between language and self (awareness) doesn’t fit with what must be true about human evolutionary development. I think about Homo erectus. Almost certainly no language, but inventive, deeply exploratory, curious, inventive. It’s hard to imagine this kind of being without at least a proto sense of self awareness.

The thing about Ildefonso (the name of the deaf man in Schaller’s book) is that he could communicate but he had no language. That is, he didn’t have the concept of categories.  He seems to have lived in a world of permanent “here/now” although he did have clear memories. What he didn’t seem to have was any sense of time (again no categories.) There is a scene right at the end of the book where Schaller is in a room with several languageless adults who are communicating with each other. They seem to do it, if I am interpreting this correctly, by generating a kind of virtual reality through repeated gestures and other body movements. Each person in the communication circle becomes a part of the created reality. Once they all agree on the reality, new elements can be added to it. By physically creating a shared reality each time they are together, they can share minds, experiences, memories, worlds.  Now that’s visual communication. But it isn’t a langauge.

(As an aside, this virtual reality idea strikes me because of a lesson in an ASL class I took some time ago. We were given a room plan with furniture, doors, windows, etc. We had to visually explain the room to another person well enough that they could draw out the room plan with accuracy. It is said that ASL native speakers have a much better sense of visual reality than hearing people do and after that lesson I believe it. Anyway, what we really had to do was create a virtual room in which all of us could move and do so without words, using our bodies, especially hands and faces.)

Something really interesting about this completely visual communication style is that languageless adults can summarize entire realities by a single gesture (agreed on by all) but what they can’t do is use that gesture to represent anything but that single experience. So they can’t name things. Naming is categorization. The idea that I am a human being is naming; it is categorization. It allows me to compare myself to others. Without that capacity comparison is essentially impossible to think about. So one can have memory but no ability to compare memories and derive second-order realities from the comparisons. How utterly fascinating that is.

What I would like to know more about is if there are any universal methodologies that languageless adults use when creating their virtual worlds for the purpose of sharing and communication. It seems to me that this would point to innate visual organization.

I’m going to try and find more information about that.

In Mitchell’s book he has been presenting description (as opposed to narration) as largely a spatial communicative act, not that description and narration are not intertwined. The whole point of Mitchell’s book is that image (description) and text (narration) are interwoven. At best they are handy labels/concepts by which we can think about their relationship to better understand how they work in our world of human representation. These concepts are, of course, also powerhouses that have a profound effect on how we see and think.

The idea of using space to represent narrative, the little seed of yin within yang (or yang within yin), seems to me critical. I asked peardg about it (she’s the one with the eye) and she sent me this as one example.

taken by peardg

Listen to this hour long podcast about the power and beauty of words. It’s stunning. I’m going to have to think about it for a while.

Thanks to mango for suggesting it.

What is it that writing and grammatology exclude or displace? Nothing more or less than the image—the picture, likeness, or simulacrum— and the iconology that aspires to be its science. If “différance” is the key term of grammatolgy, “similitude” is the central notion of iconology. If writing is the medium of absence and artifice, the image is the medium of presence and nature, sometimes cozening us with illusion, sometimes with powerful recollection and sensory immediacy. Writing is caught between two othernesses, voice and vision, the speaking and the seeing subject. Derrida mainly speaks of the struggle of writing with voice, but the addition of vision and image reveals the writer’s dilemma on another flank. How do we say who we see, and how can we make the reader see?

The paragraph went bong-bong-bong in my head and throughout this day I have returned to it repeatedly trying to let surface the chord it struck. No go so far.

To track this elusive illumination/understanding I had to open out some of the terms. Différance, for example. As I understand it différance refers to the relationship between event (the singular, non-repeatable experience of life in this moment) and machine (machine-like repeatability; the chemical and physical nature of the inorganic). Both event and machine express themselves in human beings as kinds of thinking that appear to be incommensurate yet, according to Derrida, each is internal to the other and yet remain independent.

This analysis has implications for the production of meaning in text. Words get their meaning by how they differ from other words. The example in the Wikipedia article linked above used the word “house.” “House” gets its meaning by “how it differs from “shed”, “mansion”, “hotel”, “building”, etc.” Since other words impact the meaning of “house,” no final meaning is ever achieved—there is always going to be a gap—or a circle / meaning travels around it, a semantic ouroboros and words link, ultimately, only to each other.

So that’s différance. What then is similitude and iconology? Where grammatology is the study of writing, iconology is the study of imagery; and where difference is the leavening agent with respect to meaning production in text, similarity/ resemblance is the yeast which enables visual communication. Similitude is also the source of Mitchell’s insistence that text and image are both forms of representation and not merely in opposition to each other. He says, in a footnote:

I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate “image/text” as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation. The term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. “Image-text,” with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal.

What it seems to me is that différance is an aspect of image/text and what Mitchell is trying to do is move to a place more inclusive of the work done by representation. Hence the focus on similitude.  But what of the passage that starts, “if writing is the medium of absence and artifice…”?

To address this is as simple as reflecting on the choice of conceptual mirror in the chapter. William Blake and his text+images and typography are both the conceptual bearers and the narrators of meaning. It is perhaps easiest seen in the last section that is devoted to Blake’s type. It is, first of all, a hand-produced, repeated pattern (hand drawn on copper plate for reproduction). That is, by being both event and machine, Blake’s type straddles the différance gap. One example Mitchell uses is the script that creates the word “marriage.” It was

inscribed in flowing engraver’s calligraphy, and the tails of the letters merge with the vegetative forms in the pictured scene, Blake literally embodies in the calligraphic form of “marriage the symbolic marriage that his “types” prefigure in the text of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

By doing this Blake draws in our other senses, declares text as integral to the world and reaches a place where senses create an experience rather than a loosely jumbled set of different sensations. In Mitchell’s words, “Blake wants a writing that will make us see with our ears and hear with our eyes because he wants to transform us into revolutionary readers, to deliver us from the notion that history is a closed book to be taken in one sense.” That is, meaning is not either of the eye nor of the ear. Meaning is of the senses wound together into that of which the hand is capable.

As for that last sentence—How do we say who we see, and how can we make the reader see? That’s the question, yes? My specific iteration of it is how to make the reader see sound. Don’t know yet, may never know, but nevertheless, I will keep struggling to find a form that allows for it. Rock on Blake!