By "a sense of language" I mean a feeling for the physique, the nerves and muscles of words, and for their textures; a feeling for what language is doing almost more than what it is saying or "meaning", for what it is tracing out, acting out, gesturing forth, embodying; a feeling for the intrinsic qualities of words, their origins and transformations, their minute particularities as they establish themselves by context, by location, by rhythm; a feeling for their ability to declare, in precise configurations and ordered hierarchy, multiple meanings, often contrary; a feeling for the inner shaping energy that comes to the ear as shapely rhythm, as a tune often so subtle that it might seem to be on the fringes of silence. To follow this thread - a thread that leads back into the mind and into the source of our most inventive endowment - is to move toward the centre of articulation and initiative both in ourselves and in what we are studying. - George Whalley 1985, 140 complex -- even contradictory -- upper partials of implication - Whalley 1985, 148
Most important recent science of language: 1. Neuroscience of language 'distributed processing' 2. Gestural origin of human language (NB The great dance) 3. Joint attention studies, eye gaze and mutual presence 4. Animal language studies 5. 'Mirror neurons': action observation and premotor facilitation 6. Hemispheric specialization for language
Joint attention If perceiving another creature's eye-direction sets creatures up (in some circumstances) to look where the other is looking, both creatures will be seeing the same thing, will be about the same thing. Being about the same thing (perceptually and later simulationally) is a precondition for much else. Lateralization and manual precision Hemispheric specialization is likely to have been important in whatever happened 50,000 years ago. Language hemisphere swift and flexible, accommodating every kind of transient simulation; real-world hemisphere keeping a stability it takes from the stability of the world itself. Chimps have quite precise manual control
and use and make tools of a sort. Manual precision is not lateralized, though,
in chimps. There is a good case for lateralized/specialized tool-use manual
skill preceding and allowing the development of language with its fast fine-scale
manual-oral precisions. Tools before language. Syntax of tool-use gestures
before linguistic syntax. See Rizzolatti's paper on mirror cells, grasp
and language.
My own hypothesis that speech and gesture are elements of a single integrated process of utterance formation in which there is a synthesis of opposite modes of thought global-synthetic and instantaneous imagery with linear-segmented temporally extended verbalization. Utterances and thoughts realized in them are both imagery and language. - McNeill 1992, 35 (McNeill is a linguist-psychologist who studies guestures that occur with speech.) The recent South African film about Bushman hunting, The great dance, is suggestive about the relations between whole-body imitation, gesture, and language.
Canonical Neurons In several recent brain imaging experiments, subjects were asked to (a) observe, (b) name silently, and (c) imagine using various man-made objects (e.g., hammers, screwdrivers, and so on). In all these cases, there was activation of the ventral premotor cortex, that is, the brain region activated when using those same tools to perform actions (Perani et al. 1995; Martin et al. 1996; Grafton et al. 1996; Chao and Martin 2000). |
... silence the companion of language
Speaking bodies: understanding language as embodied
An integrated way of understanding language as a function of human bodies, which in turn are part of the physical earth.
Speaking bodies minicourse outline (IMA residency spring 2005).
Introduction
- Basic principle: language as structural
influence
- What is at stake?
Speaking bodies I. How language happens: the recent science of language
- A wholistic description whole bodies
- Evolution
- Self-organization
- Wholistic description wide nets
- Integration and segregation within a wide net
- Evolution
Speaking bodies II. Topics in cognitive linguistics: metaphor, gesture, deixis and polysemy
- What's at stake: embodied vs disembodied
- Review: language as structural influence
- Traditional linguistics
- Functional and cognitive linguistics
- Topic 1: deixis
- Topic 2: gesture
- Topic 3: metaphor and polysemy
- Topic 4: hemispheric specialization
- Topic 2: gesture
- Review: language as structural influence
Speaking bodies III. Language and wholeness: the transformative practice of language
- 1. Unbearable language
- 2. Principle: language changes the structure of bodies
- 3. Delightful language
- 4. Language and trauma
- 5. Language and wholeness
- 6. Another word for structural wholeness is love
- 7. Language and 'transformation'
- 8. Diagnosis
- 9. Methods
- 10. Summary
- 2. Principle: language changes the structure of bodies
Principles of embodied understanding of language
1. In the beginning was the world.
2. The body comes next, inherently related to the world.
- a. perception-action capability is primary
- b. simulation capability is derived from it
3. Representing forms and practices require these original capabilities.
4. Language is one representing capability among others (math, art, music, photography).
5. 'Thinking' as we know it involves all of these logical levels.
Representational effect is structural effect
Any representational effect is a structural alteration of the user, a physical, dynamical event.
It is always a partial effect; it is never the only thing going on for its users, who must continue also to be about other aspects of their physical context.
Representing and simulating
Representing practices can be used to organize
states in the user that are like the state that would be produced in the
presence of something. There is no external relation of environmental
thing and representing object. There is no re-presenting of the thing, only
a re-evoking of a state. The same representational form can evoke different
states in different contexts.
About language:
5000 6000 languages from maybe 10 root protolanguages, half can be considered endangered.
Evolution and language:
6,000,000 years ago divergence of hominids from an ancestral species common to both apes and human beings
Language capabilities maybe 150,000 years ago in Africa likely - call it 30,000 generations.
Based on mix of primitive and derived characteristics, ie structure derived at earlier evolutionary levels and structure unique to the species.
35,000 years ago jump in technology
12 - 20,000 years ago proto-language 'Nostratic' hypothesized.
Another, Dene-Caucasian, mother of Chinese and Na-Dene languages whose speakers among the first American migrants.
10,000 years ago proto-Indo-European
1450 BC Greek
6000 years ago first writing Middle East
English rapidly mutating 400s Old German, 700s Old English, 1300s Chaucer Dutch and Frisian closest to English influx from Vikings 787, French 1066, Latin.
In many languages most of the basic words are traceable to its ancestor, but in English 99% of words are not from OE 62% of words most used are, though
15 stablest meanings: I/me, two/pair, you, who/what, tongue, name, eye, heart, tooth, no/not, fingernail/toenail, house, tear, water, dead from these extrapolate to proto-Indo-European
Critique of passages in Blondel (from packet correspondence)
Found the passages you sent interesting and somehow plausible and somehow off. Whether I can say how.
Did you ever run into Korzybski? Count Korzybski - a big book called Science and sanity, around 1930, hypothesis something like that all personal and cultural misfunction comes from categorization errors set up by the forms of our language, and the way to fix them is to pay attention to particulars. "The map is not the territory" was him, I think.
The law of language, which is the result of social training, has as its function the depersonalization of the expression that we give to our individual states.
Something about the notion of 'expression'. We're in some physiological state, which includes cortical state, and we speak from that state, in a fashion organized by that state. What is 'expressed' in a sense is that state; even when we are not talking about our state we are talking from it. Under that notion of expression our language can't help but be expressive. It gives us away. But then what does he mean by depersonalization. There's unconsidered speech, clicheed speech, lying or inhibited or censored speech. Still not inexpressive, since each of those are themselves states one is speaking from and so expressing. And then there is the obvious fact that phenomena that cannot be perceived by more than one person at a time may not get talked about, we don't learn names in relation to them various kinds of internal self-perception and so we use what we have, which sometimes sets up structure irrelevant to the structure we began speaking from and then we are incoherent with ourselves, for instance across hemispheres?
... concluded from this that the normal mind was a mind in which the cenesthetic factor was dominated and controlled by the impersonal system of socialized discourse. While believing himself to be asserting his ego, the rational individual was in fact affirming the triumph of collective norms.
Don't know exactly what's meant by cenesthetic, but am assuming it means something about physiological self?
The way this is said has a paranoid feel: are we somehow vampirized by language, or are we responsible to use language in a considered way that consults whatever is our own cenesthetic reality? How could language be anything but impersonal? It is like money - words have to be standardized like coinage. Nonetheless it is entirely idiosyncratic and personal in its effects, though in an invisible way. For instance there is no way for anyone else to know exactly what the word 'salt' evokes for X or Y, but it functions alright without our having to know that, and in fact better because we don't know it.
It was thus not the body that imposed its law on the mind. It was society that, through the intermediacy of language, took the commands of the mind and imposed its law on the body.
What is this body-mind dichotomy, exactly and what is all this talk of law and command this is guy-speak, surely what is it that actually happens? We speak only by means of body, and by means of regularities structured into the body, and by means evolved with the body in a real world. If by 'mind' Blondel is meaning the way he hears himself speak subvocally, which it seems he is identifying with as himself, then surely mind/language is both structuring and structured by body. And yes, the fact that language is social socially evolved, socially learned and practiced will ensure that it reinforces structure common to many people. But people also have bodies that in basic ways are quite similar, which makes language possible.
The unity of the ego, in a psychological sense, is, therefore, the cohesion, during a given time, of a certain number of clear states of consciousness, accompanied by others less clear, and by a multitude of physiological states which without being accompanied by consciousness like the others, yet operate as much and even more than the former. Unity in fact means coordination.
This passage is reifying 'states' in an odd way and to odd effect. What is the picture evoked by this description 'states' as entities coexisting and coordinated. But if we think of what is happening in a body, in a cortex, all there is, is one physiological structural state, with some particular layout of activity and connectivity. The 'unity' is the unity of the body.
The difficulty with psychological explanations and descriptions often is that their entities are imaginary in this way, metaphoric.
Noting, as Dupre had done in his studies on cenestopaths, that the mentally ill had recourse to a wealth of metaphorical formulas with which to describe their symptoms, Blondel sited the anomaly not in the (supposedly neutral) bodily nervous information but in a fault in the 'eliminatory action' that should have resulted from a successful intervention of language.
What would 'elimination' mean, here? I know the experience of feeling a tension in nonverbal structure that needs me to articulate something carefully and exactly, and that is satisfied when I've done that. I can see that 'elimination' is a metaphor that is both apt and not, sort of a feeling of 'needing to go' and 'having gotten it out.' But if I think of what might be happening structurally, I think it must be more like a standing circuit relaxing, fading into the background. Yes, digesting, integrating.
I can imagine that if people don't do the work of careful articulation, language circuits and non-verbal circuits could get progressively more isolated from each other, and then language could get progressively more irrelevant to body structure as a whole, and that would be pathology.
This section's analysis has amounted to a kind of demo of a method in feeling out theoretical text within an embodiment platform.
We base our models on whatever knowledge we have, real or imaginary, naïve or sophisticated. Mental models are often constructed from fragmentary evidence, with but poor understanding of what is happening, and with a kind of naive psychology that postulates causes, mechanisms, and relationships even where there are none. Norman, 38.
This is central. Being able to see the fantasies in action is the radical necessity.